dining room painting ideas with wainscoting
voiceover:the wood whisperer is sponsored by powermatic, the goldstandard since 1921. and by clear vue cyclones. clear the air and breathe easy. (music) marc:whenever i gluemultiple boards together for a panel, i try to create the illusion that it's just one wide board. now, as wood workers we're sort of trained
to see those joints. we'll almost always see the seam where those two boards or three boards came together. but the average personwon't be able to see it. and fortunately, mosttimes, we're not building our furniture for other wood workers, we're building it for regular people. and they won't necessarilysee those joints
if you're very careful about the boards you choose and how you put them together. all right, so i've got a couple examples here from a project that i'm working on and i think they reallyshow in a really good way how you can use grain andcolor to get those boards to look like they actuallyare one single board. so let me show you the examples. now, what i've got hereare two table tops,
both for a tilt toptable that i'm building in the wood whisperer guild right now. this one here is made of cherry, this one is made of walnut. there are a couple of tricks that i employ to just create theillusion that these came from one single board. the first has to do with color. now, if you notice, thishas basically a couple
of sap wood spots. that's another trickwe'll talk about later. but ultimately the boards, the primary heart wood color hereis the same on all three of these pieces. that tends to help theillusion that this is one single board. if it varies in color too much, the eye will be able to tellthat that's a different
board there. on this one, it's a little bit different. i've got some streaking here in the middle so there are multiple colors going on, kind of like the sap wood on this guy. but overall, these are theprimary areas of color, here, this darker brown, and that's very consistent across the board. the second trick has to do with grain.
now, if you look onthis one, you could see there's a very wavygrain pattern and we've also got, well i guessyou could call it figure, some may call it blotching. in cherry it's very common. but when it happens repeatedly like this you get these dark spots and then, if it's in a pattern, it lookslike what we would say as a positive looking figureas opposed to blotching.
all right, either way that's consistent throughout the board. it's all over the place, once again reinforcing the illusionthat it's the same piece of material. pretty much the same thing on this side. the grain, we've got alittle a little cathedral pattern here, some straight grain there. so there is a lot more wild grain, but the
wild grain itself, you know, it's kind of all over the place, varying colors. it's still consistent. i guess you could say it's consistently inconsistent in the wayit looks on the surface so it still does somewhatgive the appearance of a single board. now, getting a good grain and color match is really something thatstarts at the lumber yard
well before you cut any wood. you'll want to inspect everyboard that you're buying and try to make sure that everything is fairly close in terms of color and grain. you don't necessarilywant to buy one board that has wild grain, orwavy grain, and another board that's very straight grained because you know those two are not going to go together.
and you really want to think about the project you're building. if you have an idea of the most prominent pieces, like a table top, you could look at the boards you're buying and ballpark the amount and say,"well, looks like i could "get a piece here. ican get a second piece "from down there." and you can get an idea of what boards
will be destined forwhat part of the project. planning ahead will saveyou a lot of headache. but the one trick, it's kind of cheating, not really, it's just common sense really. i don't necessarily feel like i have the most developed eye for matching colors and grains. i do the best i can and i'm getting better but, ultimately, one thing that saves me
a lot of heartache, isby making sure that all of my stuff for a particular panel that's going to be a wider panel, that it comes out of one board. all right, now of course, a single board will generally have afairly consistent color and grain pattern throughout. so, for something like a small table top, i could look at this board and try to find
the spot on it where iwould want to make a cut and then glue a couple pieces together because i could be pretty confident that the board is roughly the same color down here as it is up here. and the grain in most boards is also consistent throughout. so you could chop it into smaller pieces and it's really just stacking the cards
in your favor. that both grain and color will match up. now, the final trick i like to employ is distraction, and both of these boards use that very well. this one, in particular,is actually comprised of three separate boards. there's two on the ends here and then you've got one in the middle.
this is comprised of only two boards and the joint's right down the center. so what i did, here, wasi left the sap wood in. that's something that a lot of people will cut out. i just wanted somethingthat looked really cool and the sap wood, over time, is going to stay light while theheart wood gets darker. so this contrast is actually going to get
better and better over time. but the interesting thing is, the joint is in the sap wood. all right, so it makes ita little bit harder to see. because the eye is so drawn to the fact that there's this colorvariation and the joint line is right in line with thegrain in the sap wood. the average person will look at this and they will never know that there is a joint
going all the way down here. or two joints, i should say. now, to a little bitof a less extent, here, in the walnut piece, but you can see there's a light area in the middle. that light area crossesboth of these pieces. so it brings them togetherand makes it look like this is one, single light zone. when, in fact, it's just two boards
that were butted up together and they both just happen to have a lighter streak. put those together, now that seam just disappears. as you get more experienceunder your belt, you'll find that these things just become second nature. you don't really have to think too much about matching boards, it's just something
that you do as you'reselecting your material and cutting out the roughboards in your shop. you start to think along those lines and you just can't not think about it. it just becomes an automatic thing. you do run into a problem,then, where sometimes you just don't have theright boards on hand. you look at everything you've got and you just can't finda match that looks good.
sometimes that's the priceyou pay for perfection and you may need to goback and buy some more boards to make sure you get just the right look that you're going for. and sometimes it's worth it. some projects it's not,but that's up to you. all right, so i hope this helps you on your journey to making multiple boards look like single boards.
thanks for watching.