Starting The First Chevalet Project

This project was long ago in the plans when I first started to build the Chevalet. As I mentioned in a previous post that I got the plans from an online friend who lives in Vancouver B.C. and is a retired shipwright. On one of his fist chevy's that he built he added a little marquetry of a ship to the front bracket as a base line to remind him of where he started on his chevy.

We corresponded through email and the woodworking site Lumberjocks through the build and he ask if I was going to add the marquetry to the front which I said I was.Well as a little shout out to him for his generous help and the plans I thought I would place one of  the many lighthouses that occupy the coast of Vancouver on the front of my chevy. 

Fisgard Lighthouse,Vancouver Island

After I finished the build and was working out the plans for the marquetry I found out about a program called Inkscape that people are using to do tracing's of their pictures to use in their marquetry. This is a great program for this type of work and I have just scratched the surface on what you can do with this program.
I printed out several copies of the tracing so that I could cut different parts from them. You can actually break up your tracing into parts on Inkscape but I have yet to master that technique and wanted to get going on the project so I'll just have to try that on the next one.

Inkscape Tracing

 I found out it is best to group a number of small parts together into a packet and avoid small packets that are hard to work with on the chevy. You are actually pinching the packet while cutting as apposed to it lying on a table on a scroll saw. I have much more accuracy with this tool but its real hard to try to cut small packets.

With all the parts cut out I thought I might try a few different backgrounds and see what happens. I wanted to make the veneer in the backgrounds radiate from one side to sort of give the impression of light. The first background I cut was in figured ash and I cut the strips a little short so it was placed centered in the piece,it doesn't match the shadow lines of the picture but I kept it just the same. It worked out well for the ones I did in eucalyptus and one was done in just plain cherry.

After the pictures were in there backgrounds I added some detail to the one I was going to use for the chevalet, just some lines in the windows for dividers, the back deck and upper part of the tower for the railings.I glued it to the front bracket with Old Brown Glue and the chevy was finally finished now I will probably end up making four boxes to use the other pictures on but that can wait.