Hardwood Floors October/November 2025

but soon realized that at that rate, it might take 10 more years to complete. He then found sponsors for the project, including Bona, which allowed him to focus on the work full-time. Figuring out how to tackle such an ambitious project was no easy feat. Woudenberg spent two years developing a plan before he even started. The pressure for perfection is high when it is one of the most important paintings in Dutch history. While the original art was completed in 1642, hundreds of years before computers were invented, technology played a key role in creating “The Night Watch” in wood in 2025. Woudenberg needed a blueprint showing exactly where to put each wooden pixel. Senne Weda, who at the time was studying programming, helped him develop a computer program. “It is a bit like those paint-by-number kits from years ago,” explains Woudenberg. “The program measures the red, green, and blue (RGB) values. We photographed all the wood species available and entered their RGB values. The system then matches the colors and indicates which wood species comes closest to a particular part of the painting.” More than 50 species of wood were used in the project. Pieces of the wood were sawn into 1 cm by 1 cm pixels, totaling 195,000 pieces. “But it’s not just 195,000 pixels; you have to saw many more. Including replacements, I think I cut between 250,000 and 270,000 pixels. Most of them I cut myself, and the problem is that you cannot cut them all exactly the same size. That’s impossible. A difference of a tenth or a hundredth of a millimeter doesn’t matter on one pixel, but with 195,000 pixels it becomes a problem,” he notes. The replacements Woudenberg refers to are 17,000 pixels that had to be removed late in the process because the color or grain weren’t right. “I essentially was doing something that shouldn’t be possible. We had assigned an RGB value to each wood species, but that’s asking for trouble. Wood has grain and many variations. I knew there would be issues at the end,” he says. “Many people think I used end grain or small, ready-made parquet blocks of 1 cm by 1 cm that I could simply lay down. But because I created a diagonal wood grain, you don’t see end grain but diagonal lines, and because they are placed alternately, it gives depth. If I had used end grain, it would have been a completely different painting.” After conducting tests with Bona at their headquarters in Sweden, Woudenberg went with Bona Craft Oil 2K for its maintenance properties and resistance to potential wear. He applied the oil at the end to make the colors pop. During the project, Woudenberg also worked at Regius College in Schagen to show students that it is possible to be creative with craftsmanship. He was there for two years, and says if they wanted to, students were able to help with certain tasks as he created “The Night Watch.”

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the magazine of the national wood flooring association

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