A brief explanation of the process of creating our one of a kind pieces!
GATHERING
The journey of creating one of our art pieces begins with gathering the reclaimed wood we’ll use for future projects. The material is hand collected by us from local sources and is stored in our woodshed until we have time to process it. Most of the wood we use these days is old cedar fencing, oak flooring, and barn wood. We utilize the natural colors of the different woods in our pieces, so the more options we have the better!
PROCESSING
Each piece of wood that we gather has to be processed, which includes many steps depending on the type of material. For example, cedar fencing needs to be dismantled from fence sections to individual boards, the nails need to be removed, and then each board gets ripped down to strips on the table saw before being sanded. We then store the strips in bins based on their color. This ripping and sanding happens to every piece of wood we collect.
CREATING
Next comes the fun part - creating! The idea for a piece starts with either some reference photos of a famous landmark, a concept sketch, or from a template of a previously made landscape or scene…but it really solidifies as we go through the steps of selecting the wood and laying it out. Then we’ll go ahead and paint the wood that we need if we’re doing a sunset/blue sky or we need red for a mushroom cap. Once all of the pieces are glued up and cut out, then we add our stain so the individual pieces can stand out or show the appropriate shadows. Add some more gluing, painting, staining, cutting, and sanding to the mix and voila!
There’s actually a lot more to the creation of one of our pieces than this but we don’t like to give all of our process away. What I WILL say is that everything is cut by us using a variety of saws - either table, miter, jig, or scroll saws. Nothing we do is automated (as in using a CNC machine or a laser) and everything is created with lots of love!
We’ve been running our business for about 7 years now and it took us a while to find our style and process. We are in a place now where we’re really proud of all the art we make and we’re so thrilled that so many of you like it too. We post photos and videos on our Instagram page (@forestedway) that give some other sneak peeks into our creative process.