So, the last haul that I brought in stirred up some trouble, in the form of a reddening skin condition on my leg. That blog article ended up dovetailing in to the context of this latest haul of mine, the woodworking tools and gear haul for the LED Backlit Sparrow Spiritual Mini Meditation Woodcut Panel project, essentially a reimagined take on a throwback decorative piece that I had in my old apartment and loft.
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| The original backlit spiritual woodcut panel art piece, which I custom outfitted with a base, glass panel backing, with LED strip lights inside, with stuff from IKEA. The woodcut panel came from Marco Polo Imports, in Santa Monica, now closed. (2011) |
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| My 2026 contextually upcycled new take on a spiritual-themed and decorative meditation backlit wall panel, this time, in miniature form, so that I could accommodate doing the project from within my assisted care living group home housing environment situation. |
The project represents a change of pace, from “whatever” I was doing, previously… I guess it was a bunch of other product hauls and pigeon feeding, for the most part. Anyways, I gave the sparrows a feature part in this concept, as well as the medicinal flower inclusion, symbolizing a transition in to a different hobby, and perhaps some products in development along those lines.
So, I initially imagined the mini sparrow woodcut panel, as part of a conceptualized product marketing campaign and branding mockup of ideas and imagery, through consulting heavily with Google Gemini artificial intelligence. I floated the idea of the original woodcut panel, from its origins in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, perhaps), and I wanted the theme to be representative of my friends, the birds, along the way, with a different flower that I’d been heavily researching and studying, over the past several months, leading up to today (early April 2026), the new flower being Michelia alba, a highly fragrant subtropical tree in the Magnolia family, that was found in my mother’s first home country of Hong Kong (Great Britain, China).
My mother and I were both in to gardening, back in my teen years, growing up, and it was my retreat in to a change of pace, and it was something to work on, in between my school studies and getting in to trouble, here and there, myself. Eventually we purchased a Michelia alba tree, after seeing them available at San Gabriel Nursery. The trees were on the higher end of the price range for trees of that size, ostensibly due to the rarity that it was, here in Southern California, and for its prized fragrant flowering blooms, which appear throughout several months out of the year, in the scarce gardening regions 10 and 11, which is basically Southern California, Florida, and perhaps a few other small, scattered locations around America. Prior to purchasing one of the trees, I would commonly visit the trees at the gardening center to smell the flowers.
Here is what Gemini and I came up with, for a reconstitution formulation (a highly valuable feature):
### 10-Gram Trial Batch (Weights)
Since you're ready to mix, here are the weights for a **10-gram sample**. This is the safest way to test the balance without wasting your precious Orris or Lilytol.
| Ingredient | Amount for 10g Batch |
|---|---|
| **Linalool** | 5.30 g |
| **Lilytol** | 0.80 g |
| **Phenylethyl Alcohol (PEA)** | 0.70 g |
| **Benzyl Alcohol** | 0.60 g |
| **Benzyl Acetate** | 0.40 g |
| **Beta-Ionone** | 0.30 g |
| **Ocimene** | 0.25 g |
| **Geranyl Acetate** | 0.20 g |
| **Ethyl 2-methylbutyrate** | 0.15 g |
| **Indole (10% in DPG)** | 0.15 g |
| **Alpha-Terpineol** | 0.15 g |
| **Jasminlactone** | 0.12 g |
| **Beta-Caryophyllene** | 0.10 g |
| **Heliotropin Replacer (10% dil.)** | 0.30 g (This is 3 parts) |
| **Orris Butter (10% dil.)** | 0.10 g (This is 1 part) |
| **Methyl Benzoate (10% dil.)** | 0.05 g |
| **DPG (to finish weight)** | 0.33 g |
| **Total** | **10.00 g** |
Perhaps this gives readers a sense of the smell of the flower. It’s described as very sweet and fruity, while having some facets of other white flowers.
So, I set out in trying to recreate my favorite visual piece in my loft and in my apartment, in a renewed form, a miniature woodcut panel featuring sparrows and Michelia alba flowers.
To do this, I had to investigate the tools I would use, in order to complete the job. My search happened around the time of Amazon’s Big Spring Sale, and I found some great deals on tools and parts.
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Break. Taking a break. Here’s some stuff to look at, in the meantime.
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| The basic rotary tool kit, with bits, burrs, and a flex shaft. |
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| Some wood carving burr bits. |
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| Drill milling bits. |
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| A 60° V groove bit |
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| A tungsten carbide flame burr bit. |
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| Some other wood carving bits. |
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| One of 10 various angle V groove bits. |
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| Colored acrylic panels, for a choice of backdrop lighting for the finished art piece. |
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| The original work’s carbon paper, which is used to transfer the tracing of the image on to the woodcut panel, prior to cutting it. |
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| The carbon outlines and details of the image, on the woodcut panel, with the cut out parts blacked out. |
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| The original work piece template, as a printing. |
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| A prior version of the art piece, on the board, as a silhouette of the cut out portions. |
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| An earlier version of the carbon tracing. |
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| An imaginative pre-visualization of what the wood panel on backlit colored acrylic could look like. |
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| A color corrected original image of the art piece. |
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| A grayscale image of the work, for bit depth judgment and for tracing. |
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A 3D render of the flat image, as a pre-visualization tool.
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| Some Dremel 106 bits, for surface detail work. |
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| A long and narrow carbide burr, for chucking out wood more effectively. |
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| Neodyminium magnets, for attaching the acrylic panels to the wood piece (potentially). |
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| A more recent, angled view of the woodcut panel, where a good portion of the outlines has been completed. |
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| The backlight framing shadow box, with a 5 meter strip light (one white color only). |
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| The frame box, in prototype form, with mounting hardware holding the colored acrylic panel in place, with the backlights on. |
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| 10 mil Mylar sheets, for diffusing the light, prior to it hitting the acrylic panel. |
Now, about 10 days in to the project, you can get an idea as to what the end product will look like. I’ve gotten a little bit further on the woodcutting panel, and I may have made some slight errors, in cutting out some of the wood parts, such as the birds’ beaks, in one or two cases, but perhaps that will be fixable before the woodcutting is done. I put together the backlight frame, after much shopping around, and I settled on a 5 meter USB-powered white only strip light, which was very cheap, from Temu. I tried some RGB colored puck lights, but the diameter of the lights wasn’t quite sufficient to cover enough surface area, so I guess I’ll use those in some other way.
Overall, I’m pretty satisfied, so far, with the progress of things; I spent several nights and a couple of days out, doing the woodcutting outdoors, and creating the backlit LED box portion of the project was another task entirely. It’ll take some figuring out, still, as to how the woodcut panel will stick on to the acrylic, and I imagined that it could be done using neodyminium magnets, which are very powerful, for their size, so I purchased some. The entire piece is loosely constructed, mostly because I’d like to have the option to try out different colors of the acrylic panels, since this is the only prototype version of the product that I have, so far.
Hopefully, in the next few days, I’ll have the silhouette carved out, and we can preview what the woodcut panel will look like, when mounted on top of the light box.
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| This is what the woodcut looks like after several work sessions and 11 days later. |
I went out and did a work session for a couple of hours, and I’m pretty pleased with the results, so far. The mistakes I had made are reparable, and I’m almost through cutting flush lines out of the cutout sections. I think I might be able to preview the work on the backlit panel this evening, if I put in one more work session, prior to this evening.
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| My first rough cut of the silhouette of the woodcut panel, on top of the backlit panel. |
So I spent a couple more hours on chucking out the cut out spots and straightening the edges up, between the form that was to stay put, versus the cut out spots. Someone had mentioned that it’s difficult to make out the subject matter, in this portrayal of the woodcut panel, so I’m thinking that it could be the color of the wood itself, or of the acrylic panel, or perhaps the piece would do better if it had spotlights or dome lights, overhead. I don’t know if I should try to define the forms of the subject matter more so, using fine drill milling, along the surface detail lines, I hadn’t planned for that. Essentially, the original woodcut panel was a more motif-based piece, based on foliage and flourish types of effects of the cut patterns, centered around a lotus flower - much simpler, and the foreground detail was still recognizable, despite that the piece was backlit.
Next, I placed a white acrylic panel underneath the woodcut, for comparison with the original large form piece. I did some mockup dramatic color shifting, along with boosting some image component sliders here, lowering some others, there. I wanted to take a peek at what the piece would look like with some stain, along with more emphasis on the pencil lining that still exists on the wood, and here, I emphasized the contrast and black point. It gave me a sense of depth to the otherwise flat edged silhouette panel, as though the grooves had been defined by further woodwork (that still needs to be done). In any case, this visualization of the piece gives a far more relatable image, for its detail, and for its color, which would be achieved by applying some wood stain. I think that the piece will look something like this (at least, hopefully), or perhaps a bit better, for being naturally wrought, rather than digitally altered. I just wanted to get the piece to a place right around this spot, to check on the visual effect of the backlighting and to check out different colored acrylic panels, for reference.
Here’s the panel with a spotlight, and another image with a dome light. Both add definition and detail, in otherwise natural light, and they’re both plausible display scenarios, for the end user.
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| Natural light and coloration, with a spotlight. |
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| Natural light and coloration, with a dome light. |
So, what remains to be done is the surface detail of the piece, making grooves and edging things off, here and there. Outside of trying some stain on the wood panel, which would come later, at the end, or close to it, some surface lighting adds a lot of definition to the existing cuts and tracing lines.
Here’s what the kit looks like, in the dark.
Next, I tried a turquoise panel. I’m pretty fond of this combination, in the dark of the night. The nearly black silhouette goes well against a luminous backdrop, and it reminds me of a Bash command line terminal aesthetic.
