Wooden Dowel Pixel Art

I made this wall decor pixel art project using standard dowels from the home center. I hope it inspires you to make one also!

Poplar wooden dowels

Oak wooden dowels

Wood glue

Wood for frame

Wood stain (optional)

Drill (optional)

Band saw (optional)

Table saw (optional)

Sand paper

Choose a design and lay it out. I used SketchUp because I'm familiar with it but I'm sure you could use other programs like Illustrator to do the same thing. Just be sure you have an idea of the final size so you can calculate how many dowels to buy. Don't forget that some material is lost with each cut so make sure to buy extra dowels.

For my treble clef design I made all the dowels of the treble clef out of the oak dowels because I wanted the clef to be darker than the background. I cut them all the same length which was about 2 inches. I made a jig for my band saw and set up a stop so I could make repeatable cuts.

For the background I used the lighter poplar dowels. I used the same jig to cut these but I made them all random lengths. To make sure the clef really stands out in a 3 dimensional way I made sure all of the poplar dowels were at least about 0.25 inches shorter than all the oak dowels.

Sanding hundreds of dowels is super boring. I bolted a flange to the bottom of a 5 gallon bucket and attached some 80 sand paper on the inside. Then I used some small casters I had laying around and rigged up a tumbling sanding thing on my bench. I used a clamp to keep the drill spinning and let the dowels slowly tumble until all the burs from the saw had been removed. I didn't go any finer on the sand paper because I really liked the texture that was left after the 80 grit.

I used some DIY stain which is just steel wool and vinegar. There are tons of recipes on the web if you want to make your own. This stain really darkens the tannins in wood and oak has a lot of tannins! It's really cool to watch this stuff work. It turns the oak dowels almost black in about 10 seconds.

You don't want to accidently glue your art project to your bench. Prepare a work surface by covering one side of some scrap plywood with packing tape. Any glue that drips through will not permanently stick to the taped surface.

Depending on your design this step can take a while so plan to do this as you can over several days. Keep a printout of your design handy so you can reference it while you glue each dowel in place.

Because of the hexagonal pattern created by the way circles fit together, there will be half-circle gaps along two sides of your project. If this bothers you then you can rip a bunch of dowels in half and glue them into the gaps.

I put some thin strips of oak around my project just to make it look framed. It's not an actually removable frame. It's literally glued to the dowels and I did simple butt joints just to keep it easy. I also added some smaller dowels to reinforce the butt joints but I'm not ever sure that was necessary since the frame pieces are all glued in place.

Last steps are to trim the frame to size and sand the frame.

This piece looks super cool from far away AND up close! Enjoy!