How to Build your own Artist Wood Panel

1. Class Trailer: Hi everyone. I'm Caitlin Mary, and I'm Cameron Gray. And we created this class together for you to learn how to create. An artist would panel it here more of a hobbyist. Or if you're more at a professional level or anywhere in between this class is for you. Cameron goes through what to look for when you're even buying your wood, to common errors that you might come across, how to fix them. Some beginner tips on how to create those real accurate cuts, especially on the angle, things that need to be precise, just extra details that he has learned through his experience doing trial and error, and also his skills, knowledge, and experience that he has acquired through being a professional carpenter. So we've got to put a lot of energy into this process to make sure you have lots of information to help you get to. Step-by-step. It's easy for you to cre. We created this class and put all of our energy into making it the best it could possibly be, because we are passionate about helping others so that their partners and support people can learn how to create artists panels to it has been incredible, having creative control to create any size of wood panel that I want. I hope you enjoy the class and most of all, I hope you have lots of fun creating your artists would panels. Do you have anything you wanna add? Be safe. Don't lose your fingers. 2. Introduction: What you will Need: Hi everyone. My name's Cameron and I am a carpenter as well as the residential architect. And today I'm gonna teach you how to build a 12 by 16 would artist panel, I need you to make sure that you have four clamps. Minimum. Measuring tape tensile. Some painters tape green or blue is fine. Insta bonds, which is a glue. Regular wood glue, and orbital disc sander with 120 grit. Or if you don't want to spend money on that, just a sanding block will be fine. A table saw, miter saw. And lastly your P supplying fine and you're piece of plywood. Hello. 3. Lesson One: Rip the Backing Pieces: So our first step here is we're going to be ripping our piece of flying down to five eighths. So what you'll need is your table saw if he supine in a measuring tape. So before we get started, I want to talk about long faces and short faces as this is a very important part of ripping your pieces to the proper length. So whatever the long face of the material, the bigger of the two numbers between the thickness and the length is going to be your long face. So in this example, this is going to be a long face and this is going to be your short face. So when we're ripping our piece down to five eighths, we're going to be wanting to put the short face up against the fence of the table saw. So to get started on our table salt, we're going to take your measuring tape and butting into our fence. And we're going to go from our fence to the inside of the blade at five eighths of an inch. And once you have the front lock, the table saw and it's always a good idea just to check the back of the saw is also at 05:00 AM watching him and video few See my left hand. I like to keep that firmly planted on the table saw and that'll help keep pine take towards the fence. As typically use my right hand to push the piece through o. And then when we come to the end here of the piece to grab the push stick just to finish off the gut. So then your hand doesn't get within two inches of the blade. 4. Lesson Two: Cut the Backing Pieces: So step two is we are going to be cutting our piece of pine that we just rip to its finished light on our miter saw. So also need miter saw, measuring tape and a pencil. So our first step to get going is we wanna make sure that our short face, which is our 5-8 thickness, is going to be pressed up against the fence or the miter saw is very important as it is going to give us her finish width of seven eighths. So again, making sure the five eighths side is up against the fence. We're going to start by cutting a 45-degree angle on our peace. Making sure we have 45 degrees honor saw. And when we're making this first-cut, makes sure the pieces tight up against the fence and we want to take out is the minimal of material as possible. Since I'm building a 12 by 16 panel today, I'm going to be measuring 16 inches from the long point of our angle. So hooking on to the long point and we're going to be going 16 inches. Now, keep in mind this is a long, too long measurements, so that's 16 is going to be a long point over 45. And what I'd like to do is to draw directional arrow and in which way the angles going to be going when we cut it. So in essence we have are 16 mark. We want to turn our saw again to the other side at 45 degrees. And we're going to making sure, again, short faced against the fence. And we're going to line up the inside of a blade to a pencil mark that we've made. Three words ice on more at 162, at 12. As you can see here, I'm just finishing up my final cats. At the end of this process, you should have two pieces at your desired length and two pieces at your desired width. For us today, this is 16 inches by 12 inches. Next, we need to send them. I want to remind you to keep in mind I've been practicing this for a long time. So if you're working on that's okay. Be patient, keep practicing. It will come to you. Most importantly, I want you to have fun with it. So our next step is to sand down our four pieces that we just finished cutting on the miter saw switch. You'll need the pieces ascending sponge or your orbital disc sander with the 120 grit. So what we wanna get rid of all the pieces are any saw blade mark. So if our highlight them, you can see the marks. Now we want to get rid of that. If we have any bearing from the sockets right there, you wanna make sure we get rid of that and obviously want them as smooth to the touch of the finger. And if you're using a orbitals descender like me, a few little tips on using that was always want to keep our pieces flushed together when we sand and not actually tip the orbital, this Sanders outgoing, that's going to wreck our disk. And we just always want to keeping moving back and forth and not stationary in one spot. And if we do need to take down a little bit of material, just simply hover over that spot back and forth until that rij is gone. And if we're planning to use a sponge today, a sanding sponge, there's nothing really particular and techniques or anything. It's just a back and forth movement until it's smooth. 5. Lesson Three: Build the Backing: So now since we have all of our sanded pieces, Our next step is just to dry fit all the corners and make sure that our joints look nice and to make sure that we have a square frame before we glue all of it together. So just for the step, just take your simply your painter's tape and we're going to take each corner. So joint sloughed, nice. And now it's time to check for our squareness. How to do that? You're gonna take your measuring tape. You're going to hook it onto 1 and go diagonally across to the other. So there we have 2020 inches. And then we check the other corner. Click on in order we have 20 inches. That means this is perfectly square and we're good to go in all our joints or look nice so we can glue it together. I'd like to use insta bond because a glues the connections together within three seconds. So it's going to speed up the process. Rather if I just use regular wood glue, we will have to wait for each joint to dry, which could drag on for hours as this makes this step down within a few minutes. So in this long comes in two parts we ever glue and we have our activator. And we're gonna put these two compounds on different surfaces. So to start, we're gonna put our glue on one of the two angles. And preferably we want to keep the center of her angle as this will permanently stain RPS if we get it on the finished edge. So keep it center and we have our activator. We want to put that on the other piece. And don't worry that this will not stain or peace at all. And then we simply hold are joint together. We have one shot at this and we firmly hold it together for a few seconds. And then we have it at joints connected. Now we move on to the next one. For bigger pieces, you're able to flex the pieces a little bit without the joints breaking. So you're still able to apply your glue and your activator WiFi's. So when it comes to building smaller panels and frames, this process when it comes to going this final one can be rather challenging. You may find it best to glue both corners and spray both activators and the other pieces at the same time and glue it together. There we go. Good. 6. Lesson Four: Rip the Panel: So the next step is to cotton rip our piece of plywood down to 12 by 16. If your things I want to make mention before we get started with this, you wanna make sure that you're finished. Ps is facing up and the side that you do not care about is going to be placed on the table saw. Because what may happen is that you will get some killing or fraying along the underside of your piece from that blade. So to get started here, we're gonna take our table saw and measure 16 inches, again from the fence to the inside of the blade. So once I got the front set at 16, always good to check the back as well. And we have that. And for these wider Cuts, yeah. Always turn this fence support up which will help your piece not actually tilt down below. And let's go. I moved my piece rather slowly FUV a saw and that will also actually help prevent that tilling on the backside. So in essence, if you ever 16, same thing inside of the blade. Well, check for I'll get. 7. Lesson Five: Putting it all Together: So for this next step, we're going to be using wood glue. And the reason being is that with glue takes about ten minutes to partially setup. And within that ten minutes, we can manipulate our piece of plywood to fit just right on our frame. Rather, instead of using the bond, it sets up way too quick. And it's just not possible to do that. So we need to glue these two pieces together, plywood and our frame. So we choose the side that we wish to hide away from the plywood. I'm going to choose this side. From here. I'm just going to take my wood glue and run small bead down the middle of the piece around the whole thing. And then once I have that, I'm going to smear it out with my finger. And the reason being is that if I don't, there's a good chance that this would glue is going to ooze out the side of my pieces and I don't want that. So this just helps prevent any of that happening. And if it does, it's easy just to wipe up after you have your pieces clamped together. So from here, this is a very important part of the processes that we're going to actually line up two corners of our piece. So I'm going to be lining up these two faces with our plywood. So once I have these two pieces lined up, nice and just gonna clamp that corner of our panel. And sometimes it may move when you apply pressure. So you just have to play around with that. Then on one side that we just lined up, we're going to line it up the whole stretch term here. We got where I want just gonna put a clamp on it. Then from here, our second corner that we lined up her face. This is where we can start to manipulate or piece a little bit and get this face lined up and flush. So we're good there. And then simply we're just going to clamp our last corner. And now since we have all four corners clamped, You should be left with two sides that are completely flush, and two sides that have a little bit of the frame still protruding a little bit from our piece of plywood. And that's what we want. Because at this stage, all four sides were probably never line up perfectly. So we will address the two. So that stick out in the next lesson. And now one thing is want to make mention to look for is that sometimes your piece of plywood and your frame maybe not completely tight on the longer faces of your panel. So in this instance, this is where an extra clamp could come in handy that you could close that gap. But we are all good. And we just let this setup and dry. 8. Lesson Six: Finishing Touches: Our next step here is we have to rip down the protruding edge of our frame to make it flush with our plywood. In my experience of making many of these panels, I've found that my frame always seems to be a tad bit bigger than my plywood. This may be due to the fact that when I align my meters, it seems to make the measurement a tad bit longer than what I had cut it at. But in the event that the opposite happens to you, when the plywood sticks pass their frame. I need you to measure the frame and rip it at that measurement. Since my frame sticks out further than the plywood, I am measuring the plywood to double-check that i have 12 inches and then I'm going to rip that through the table saw. And just some basic tips. As before, we want to move our peace slowly through the saw and making sure that the finished piece of plywood is facing up to reduce that chilling effect. Now we rip the other side. I measure 16 inches from the fence to the inside of the saw blade. And I just put down my fence support for those wider rips. And let's do our final rip. Our final step here is to give our panel a final ascending over. Especially besides that we just ripped and checking the other sides for any dense or damage that could have happened in our process. And once you're done, Congratulations, you're done building your first panel. Now you can give it to your artist and you can start painting. Yeah. 9. BONUS: Wood 101: So to build our frames then artists would panels. We're going to be using a piece of pine and a little bit about what is that fine is softwood. So it can actually get dented pretty easily, but you can sand it down pretty quickly as well. Also, softwood lumber is a lot cheaper to buy rather than hard lumber. So when it comes to actually buying your lumber and picking up from lumber store right here, want to molding is a pretty well perfect piece of pine. We see, we just have one small knots in it, but that's okay because we can always wrap around that. And also you we can actually we call this a Wayne, where it will most likely happen on the corners, but will actually start to see some of the old bark from the trees actually be included in your piece of pine. It's one last thing when it comes to buying the pine is that we want to look for a warping or any coupling in the wood. So we're looking for any thing. If you take your piece of pine and you actually look down the board, you'll actually see it could make a very slight C OR could wiggle a little bit. And we want to choose a piece that's mostly straight and both planes and a wide and also in the narrow. So when it comes to buying new sheet of plywood, we're really looking for is to make sure we have a smooth finish on the one side with no excessive dense or in knots as the knots may fall out if you rip right through it and then that makes that part of the panel garbage. And then one other thing I like to look for what we call planar marks. So when they're ripping this down to its finished thickness, there may be along streets, the lines going through it, and it's best just to take a look down. You're finished. You're finished side. And to see if you see any of those planar marks. And that's all you really need to look for. 10. BONUS: Common Joint Errors: So if you think that is one, I make mention about gluing these things together in common. Faults that may occur. The first most common one is probably a joint won't meet up perfectly. And that's maybe because your angle cut may have been off a little bit. So there's two options to fix this as either you can get some wood filler and just simply fill in the joint that has a slight gap to it, that'll work perfectly fine. But if the gap is big, I suggest just removing the piece and just read cutting it. Because most likely you will have some leftover lumber to make that extra piece. And other common fault could be that two pieces don't perfectly aligned, flushed together on the top and bottom. If that does happen, you can just simply send that down. And that'll, that'll solve that. And then lastly, you may have some glue is out, out of your joints. And to solve that, we can just easily hide that with a piece of plywood and cover that face that we don't see that. 11. BONUS: Beginner Tip for Cutting: So if you're finding that you're struggling making accurate cuts for your 45s. This may help you. So what I like to do sometimes is I would like to drop my p. So my saw blade is just a tad back from our line. And I'll make a little cut into the piece and then adjust the piece slightly, moving it a little closer to our ally. And I'll repeat this process maybe three or four times until my blade meets up perfectly with our line. So just to give you an example visually. And then lastly, now since you have that piece, we're left with these little half cut marks. So if you're planning to reuse that angle for your next piece is make sure you clean it up. A little flag on that one.