A Man Gets Creative Left Alone in His Workshop

While I have been busy berry picking daily for the last couple weeks, my husband has seized the opportunity of having our garage workshop to himself.
For some reason he had the urge to create some larger wall hangings made from pallet wood.

The first project he decided to do was to create a mountain scene.

This is what is started as.

At this point I suggested he might want to add colour to the back part to resemble sky. His response was, “Go get a bunch of different colours for me to try”. I went into my craft room and grabbed a bunch of different acrylic paint bottles. He tried wiping the watered down paints on pieces of wood scrap until he found some colours he liked. He also decided to add some wood pieces to the front to depict the tree line. The last addition was a set of battery LED lights giving it a soft glow in a darkened room.

I managed to catch the sun streaming in on it on a sunny morning. You can see how the wood grain comes through the colour.

Seeing that wood grain coming through, but not enough, prompted him to start another project; a wooden flag. He decided to burn all the wood first, then used a restorer to clean off most of the charr leaving the wood grain blackened and slightly raised.

He already knew which reds to go with from his painted wood scrap samples from the mountain project. He used a slightly different red for the maple leaf and middle stripe. You can see how burning the wood makes the grain of the wood pop..

The last project was also a flag but this one was just for fun. We have had this large plywood Meeple sitting in the garage since last fall. It was too big for this project but he decided to make a smaller Meeple using two pieces of pallet board.
This is how it looked after using the propane torch and cleaning off the charr.

On either side of the Meeple he added pallet pieces for each of the colours most often found used as board game pieces. White and black are also common but he wanted the background white and the Meeple to be black.

He was going to leave the one section natural but “brown” is not often used in games. I blended a red and blue paint for him to create a purple that is more common.
Here is the final look.