Our good friend commissioned this wall art piece of one of her favorite scenes, the Na Mokulua islets (the “Mokes”) off the coast of Oahu just after sunset. The main asks were to use primarily Hawaiian native wood and to have a natural style. After a couple of iterations we came up with this design, which uses Hawaiian Koa wood for the Mokes and Milo wood for the frame. I loved working with the beautiful Hawaiian woods, which were both completely new to me. These “artsy” projects make me nervous (I’m an engineer after all), but I love how it turned out.

The previous mountain art piece I did was all straight lines and angles, but for this one we wanted smooth curves. So, I created custom vector images from photos of the islands and cut them out on the Shaper Origin, along with the waves and the moon.

I used stain instead of paint to keep everything natural and maintain the wood grain for the waves, background, and moon. I never thought I’d use Sapphire Blue and Peacock Green colors from Rubio but here we are. I mixed those two colors with Charcoal at varying ratios to create the gradient look of the water. The background is finished with Charcoal and the moon, made of Maple, with White.

The frame was made out of Hawaiian Milo which had some crazy and unexpected character once I started cutting into it. Both the frame and the Mokes were finished in Rubio Pure.

With the little bit of scrap I had left, I made a little Koa jewelry tray.