Handmade Wooden Earrings & Pendants with Painted Canvas Inserts

I've been creating earrings and pendants from walnut, red oak, and padauk, each featuring a unique painted canvas insert. They're lightweight, handmade, and one of a kind.

I start by cutting solid hardwoods—such as maple, red oak, walnut, and padauk—into strips. From these, I laser cut earring and pendant blanks.

Next, I create a painting, which is then laser cut into canvas inserts. Finally, each piece is assembled, finished with varnish, and fitted with sterling silver findings: ear hooks and jump rings for earrings, and jump rings with cotton cord for pendants.

Monet Cowboy Mosaic

I've been exploring the art of mosaic-making over the past two years. This second 20” × 20” piece is based on a photograph of a friend wearing a cowboy hat.

The colour palette draws from hues Monet used in his garden paintings. Photo editing and colour selection took time—seven versions were tested before I arrived at the artistic result I was after.

My process, as usual, is fairly technical. It took about four months to write a custom application that converts photographs into mosaics using a chosen set of colours.

Hand-assembling a 1,600- or 3,600-piece mosaic is time-consuming (40+ hours), so I modified my application to consolidate contiguous tiles of the same colour into single, shaped “tiles.” This greatly reduces assembly time.

Each 1/8" thick Baltic birch panel is painted with acrylic in one of the selected mosaic colours. The shaped tiles are then laser-cut from these panels. Before cutting, each panel is covered in green tape to prevent smoke damage from the laser; the tape is peeled off after cutting.

Next comes the hand assembly. Each tile is glued in place on the wooden base using wood glue. The full assembly process takes place over about three days.

Assembly of Mosaic.

Included here are some of the more “boring” technical details—for those who are curious. I used the development of my Mosaic Photo Application as an opportunity to learn a new programming language called Rust. It’s known for being fast and powerful, but also challenging to learn. It took me about four months before I had anything useful. If I had used Python—a language I already knew—the process would have been much faster.

To create contiguous tiles, I had to dive into a few computer science concepts: edge tracing, bin packing, depth-first search, and the SVG (scalable vector graphics) file format. That part of the project added another three months of development time.

Regular Tetrahedrons

My latest fascination has been regular tetrahedrons. My goal is to fabricate these in stainless steel.

To start, I modelled a regular tetrahedron in Fusion 360 and 3D printed a few as a sanity check. From there, I moved on to making them from 3 mm Baltic birch plywood. Each tetrahedron requires laser cutting four equilateral triangles. After cutting, I use a sanding jig to bevel the three edges of each triangle to the correct angle so the sides fit together cleanly without gaps.

For assembly, I use a glue-up jig that holds the triangles in place. The core process—cutting, beveling, and glueing—takes about five minutes per tetrahedron.

To prepare each tetrahedron as a painting surface, I fill any cracks with wood filler, sand each side, and apply gesso to all four faces. This creates a smooth, paint-ready surface.

Each tetrahedron offers four perfect faces for miniature artwork. Grouped together, they can form larger sculptural or wall-mounted pieces. The potential for repeating patterns—in both 2D and 3D—is endless. I am looking forward to exploring the possibilities of this space.