I am speechless Mike. I cannot imagine allowing someone to put something down on this "tray". I am in total awe as to this element of woodworking.
Mike I have way too many questions your work brings up.
Thickness of wood?
The veneer is 1/42" thick. For these panels, I glued them to 1/2" Baltic birch. There's a fancy face veneer on the bottom, but not marquetry. I'll post a picture of the bottom veneer of the first panel later.
How do you cut it?
Veneer is cut a number of ways. When preparing the veneer, I'll usually cut it with a veneer saw, but if I need a delicate cut, I'll use a knife. I use a Japanese laminated knife (actually, two, a left bevel and a right bevel). For marquetry, there's several ways to cut the pattern. I use a scroll saw (Hawk RBI, 26"). I make up a packet which consists of layers of veneer of the different colors that I want to use in the design. I use cardboard on top and bottom to minimize splitting when cutting. The pattern (called a "cartoon") is glued to the top layer of cardboard. The scroll saw blade is a 2/0 blade. I cut vertically but some people tilt the table so that they can get a better fit of the pieces into the holes - since the blade has width and leaves a kerf. The advantage of cutting vertically is that you can make multiple copies at the same time. For example, when I did the first panel shown above, I made two more copies of the design and put in two halves of a radial pattern of walnut burl - I'll post a picture of that also, later. Two things mitigate the kerf width - (1) when you glue with water based glue, the veneer expands and fills some of the kerf, and (2) I use urea formaldehyde glue and put enough so that it comes up in the kerfs, filling them. If you look closely (probably need to see it in person), you'll see a glue line along the pattern. If the color of the glue is right, it'll match the veneer well enough so you won't notice it.
How much true "artistry" ability is involved.
I have zero artistic talent. What I do is search the web for pictures of flowers that I like. Then I print them out and trace the flower using tracing paper. Then assemble the flowers into a design I like. I may draw one or two flowers, especially buds, myself to fill out a design. Drawing the design takes a lot of time, maybe half the total project time.
Can a right brainer do this or do you need to be a creative type.
A right brainer can definitely do this. But let me warn you, marquetry is a build up skill. You need to know the basics before you tackle it. You need to know how to build furniture because marquetry is applied to furniture. Then you need to know how to work with veneer because you have to do a lot of regular veneer work to build a marquetry design. And finally, doing marquetry is tedious in the extreme. There's a lot of very small pieces and they have to be accurately cut out (so you need good scroll saw skills), they need to be kept track of (so you need a good system to lay the parts down so you can find them later), they then need to be sand shaded, then put into the field, and any pieces which were damaged have to be remade. Then the finished panel of veneer is glued to the substrate. It's a slow process. One of these panels takes many days.
What i cannot get my mind around is not having the wood split with the grain line while cutting sanding and the likes or are you using a knife and thin veneer ??? Yeah this is one that could do with one of your excellent tutorials.
I described cutting the veneer, above. Sanding is not done until you glue the veneer down on the substrate. There are issues in the gluing process but that's part of learning to work with regular veneer (non-marquetry). Once the veneer is glued down, the rest is standard finishing, except you need to make sure you don't sand through the veneer.
BTW Mike son is doing very well in Calculus.
actually extremely well something must have rung a bell.
Glad to hear it. Give him my best and all the encouragement you can.