Decorative Imaging prints Traditional Wood Marquetry

The summer edition of O At Home has an article on a New York company called Decorative Images who generates extremely traditional decorative surfaces by printing them onto wood veneer with a large format digital printer.

The men choose wood from the the thousands of high-resolution textures in their digital library. "We have scans of 600 different sheets of oak," Kusek says. "It's like having a lumberyard in your computer." To simulate a patina, they add layers of computerized grime.

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There is also an article about the firm online at the Wide Format Imaging website.

In addition to custom work for decorators, they are debuting a line of tiles, borders, and medallions that the rest of us could use in our decorating.



They are worth a look, and then at least an hour of draydreaming on how you could hack traditional design motifs to make them steampunk, if you only had access to a large format printer. (Or what you could do at home on your laser printer with a small piece of wood veneer. Perhaps a case for a obscure scientific device?)