My Elaborate Early Diagrams

My first step for making any marquetry project is to draw the picture that I’m going to make. My drawings are a bridge between the idea that I have in my head for an image and creating that image out of wood.

When I was still in the early stages of learning marquetry, my drawings weren’t just versions of the image that I intended to make. They were elaborate diagrams showing the order in which I would cut each piece of veneer and the direction of each cut.

One of the earliest marquetry panels that I made was a picture of a baby Baird’s tapir. It was the first project that I made without extensive input from my dad.

I started with a photograph that I took of Moli, a tapir born at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston in 2013. It’s not a great photograph, but I liked the pose.

I used the Procreate program on my iPad to make a set of drawings based on that photo.

First, I made a rough sketch of the tapir.

Next, I made a color version of the picture, to give me an idea of the shades of woods that I wanted to use.

I then went back to drawing in black and white and made a line drawing, where every line is a joint between two pieces of wood (including woods of the same color).

I then drew over this line drawing to show more detail about how I would make each cut. The color-coded numbers are the order in which I would make each cut, and the arrows are the direction of each cut.

I knew that I would make the legs separately and then join them to the body – that is why some of the numbers appear more than once.

Apparently I was confident that I could make the tapir’s face without this level of planning, because my drawing didn’t include any markup for the face.

As I always do, I ended up deviating from my drawing when I actually started cutting the wood. For instance, I had planned to make the lines on the tapir’s face jagged and ended up making them smooth.

This was one of the last drawings that I made with this kind of detailed cut diagram. In fact, part-way through making this panel, I realized that I barely needed my diagram at all. But the process of making the diagram was still helpful to me and made me confident that I could do the project.