How many ways to color cedar?

[brad hays]

I'm working with a local artist to develop an idea I've had over the last year. Have you ever seen what's known as a photo collage? It's where hundreds of small pictures are put together, side by side in rows and columns so that they make a larger picture when viewed as a whole. Those photos are always made by software. We'll I'm trying to do basically the same thing except with small wood blocks. The idea is that I'm to make a lot of different small wood squares, I'll say instead of blocks, and the artist puts them together to make a larger picture. The smaller the block the higher resolution the final image will be, just like the pixels on your tv. So, with all this in mind, my goal is to find wood with unique color patterns. After thinking on it for a long time I'm sure just regularly grained wood would be suitable for this new process, and so I've just been sitting on this idea for a minute, until I went to the lumber yard for the first time after having this idea and found cedar! As it turns out cedar can have very unusual color patterns when it's milled down as compared to other wood species. So now my idea is a little more developed, thank heavens. So now I've got a couple questions.

I see now how finding wood species with a sharp contrast in color between the sap and hardwoods would work well in my process. Is there any other species out there that has such sharp contrast between the sap and heart wood like cedar? Walnut, maybe, is the only other that comes to mind.

Second question...how many ways are there to change the color of cedar. Staining, applying aging solutions are the only two ways I know of, and have very little experience with either, so I don't know what products are out there. So the idea is I want to be able to produce as many variations of color using cedar as possible.

What ways are there to color cedar that I haven't thought of yet?

Many thanks!

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[Jamie Buxton]

Hickory has a big color difference between heart and sapwood.

Charring is another way to color wood. Stain is likely your best method.

[Zachary Hoyt]

Walnut and hickory are both high contrast, and cherry too. Spalted wood is another possibility.

[Bill Dufour]

What happens after several years exposed to air and light. Many woods change color or at least get dull and bland.
I forget the name but a classic sky blue paint or ceramic glaze turns green after a century or so. I may have that backwards. Maybe Egyptian or middle eastern? So archaeologists thought the ancients had an odd vision of the sky. It is the copper oxidizing that changes the color.
Bill D.

[Bill Dufour]

Reminds me of the nail art by David Foster.
Bill D.
https://mymodernmet.com/david-foster-nail-art/

[Jimmy Harris]

There are also wood dyes. And I frequently use potassium dichromate to oxidize wood and give it an aged look. With some woods, especially woods low in tannins, you have to pretreat them with tannic acid for the potassium dichromate to work. But be careful with potassium dichromate. It's not as dangerous as the internet would have you believe (I use it all of the time). But it is more dangerous than dyes or stains. And you can control the level of the reaction with the amount of water you mix into the solution (or the amount of tannic acid you apply beforehand in some cases).

You can also make your own dyes and stains. Making your own dyes is a bit harder. But making your own stain is really easy. It's just thinned out paint. So you can make water-based stain with either watercolors or acrylics and water, or oil-based stains with oil paints, boiled linseed oil (or walnut oil), and some kind of thinner (paint thinner, turpentine, whatever). Be sure to use artist quality paints from a hobby store, however. Get the good stuff. Check the labels for the pigment used, and look for ones with single pigments that aren't long, complex, scientific names. Natural pigments tend to last longer and look better than synthetics. Now, there are some good synthetic pigments you can use, but you kind of have to know which ones, so it's usually best to just avoid stuff like. Most of the metal oxides should be fine. But with this method, you can stain your wood to just about any color you like, blue, green, yellow, it's all possible. It just takes a while to get the mixes right, so have a bunch of test pieces handy.