This project was built and designed by Billy from Newton Makes.
This cutting board uses a clever combination of wood tones to create a three-dimensional illusion, making flat cubes appear as if they’re popping right off the surface. Billy walks through the entire process, from milling raw lumber to applying the final finish, showing how careful wood selection and precise joinery can trick the eye into seeing depth that isn’t really there.
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Choosing the Right Wood Species
The illusion at the heart of this cutting board depends entirely on picking four wood species with distinct value gradients rather than any particular species names. Billy uses maple for the lightest tone, white oak and cherry for two mid-range tones, and walnut for the darkest shade. He notes that the exact species matter less than the contrast in color, since the goal is to mimic the look of light and shadow falling across a series of cubes.
After cutting the maple into long pieces, he lets the wood acclimate before moving forward, especially since it was milled from a particularly thick board. Letting moisture content even out prevents warping or movement later in the build, a step that’s easy to skip but pays off in a flatter final panel.
Beveling and Assembling the Blocks
With the maple, oak, and cherry prepped, Billy heads to the table saw to bevel the edges of the oak and cherry pieces at a 45 degree angle. These beveled strips are designed to wrap around the maple core, creating the mitered edges that will eventually form the illusion of shadow along each cube. Before cutting the real pieces, he tests his angle setting on scrap wood to make sure everything lines up perfectly.
Gluing these angled pieces together required careful attention to clamping pressure from multiple directions. Billy uses straight aluminum tubing as makeshift cauls to keep the miters tight and the pieces flush against each other. Rather than batch-gluing multiple sets together to save time, he chooses to glue each set individually to protect the accuracy of the pattern, even though it takes considerably longer.
Milling the Walnut Accent Pieces
While the glue on the maple, oak, and cherry sets dries, Billy shifts to milling the walnut that will alternate with those blocks in the final pattern. He only rough-cuts the walnut at this stage, planning to bring it to final thickness alongside the other pieces once everything is glued. This ensures all the components end up perfectly matched in size despite being milled at different times.
Flattening and Checking the Pattern
Once the glue cures, Billy runs the panels through a drum sander to clean them up and bring them to consistent thickness. He uses a combination square throughout this process to check that the oak and cherry strips remain even along the length of the maple, since it’s easy for a pattern to drift out of alignment during sanding. If one end sands down more than the other, a simple trick like adding tape under the thinner section can even things out by controlling how much material the sander removes.
Before the final glue-up, he dry-fits all the pieces together to double check the pattern, using a chalk triangle on top to mark orientation and avoid gluing any block in backwards. Getting the top and bottom as flush as possible during this stage saves a lot of sanding work later.
Slicing the Panel Into a Cutting Board
With the panel flattened, Billy heads back to the table saw for what he calls one of the most satisfying steps: slicing the panel into strips equal to the desired thickness of the finished cutting board. Each strip is then rotated 90 degrees, transforming the panel into a functional end-grain board. This technique is a great way to convert a flat glue-up into a thick, durable cutting surface without needing a mountain of extra lumber.
Arranging these slices into the final pattern is where the illusion really starts to take shape. Billy flips each piece on its edge and experiments with different orientations until he finds an arrangement that best sells the 3D effect, marking his chosen layout with chalk before committing to glue.
Final Glue-Up and Shaping
The final assembly gets glued as a single unit whenever possible, though Billy notes he’s willing to break it into stages if that’s what it takes to protect the pattern’s alignment. After the glue sets, he sands the board flat, mentioning that a router with a shop-made sled or a CNC machine could achieve a similar result for anyone without a drum sander.
Rather than adding handles, grooves, or feet, Billy opts for a simple beveled edge around the bottom of the board. This classic detail makes the board easier to pick up without interfering with the visual pattern on top.
Sanding and Applying Finish
Sanding progresses through several grits, starting at 120 and working up to 220. Billy uses a pencil trick to track his progress, scribbling across the surface and sanding until the marks disappear before moving to the next grit, then repeating the process to catch any remaining scratches.
Because the board will inevitably get wet during use, Billy dampens the surface with a spray bottle to intentionally raise the grain, then lightly resands once it dries. This pre-emptive step helps keep the surface smooth long term, since he’s found that end grain does raise a bit when wet, especially along glue lines.
For finish, Billy sticks with a butcher block oil made from mineral oil and food-safe wax rather than doing a full mineral oil soak, which he’s found to be messier and prone to seeping oil for a long time afterward. He applies it generously, lets it soak in, then repeats the process before buffing off the excess.
Why This Illusion Technique Works So Well
What makes this build stand out is how a straightforward end-grain cutting board technique gets elevated into something that looks far more complex than it actually is. By carefully controlling color contrast and pattern alignment, Billy creates real depth on a completely flat surface. It’s a great reminder that thoughtful wood selection and patient assembly can produce a visual effect that has nothing to do with fancy tools and everything to do with planning.
See Billy’s plans here: https://www.newtonmakes.com/shop/p/optical-illusion-cutting-board
Matt’s Take
These are my personal thoughts and tips based on my own experience in the shop. This section is not written, reviewed, or endorsed by the original creator of this project.
This kind of value-based illusion work is one of my favorite things in woodworking because it’s really about design thinking more than fancy technique. Picking species by how light or dark they read next to each other, rather than by name, is the right approach for almost any pattern work. If you’re experimenting with this yourself, it helps to lay your candidate boards out under the same lighting you’ll be finishing under, since oil and film finishes both deepen color and can shift how much contrast you actually get between species.
End-grain cutting boards are a great intro to this kind of glue-up because the process forces good habits — dry fitting, checking squareness, and marking orientation before glue touches wood. A chalk triangle or even a strip of painter’s tape across the top of your panel is a cheap insurance policy against flipping a block backwards, and it’s a habit worth building into any multi-piece glue-up, not just this one.
One safety note worth repeating any time you’re cutting a panel into strips and re-orienting them: once those strips are on edge, they can be narrow and awkward to feed through a table saw safely. A sled, plenty of hold-down pressure, and push blocks make a big difference in keeping fingers well clear of the blade during that step.
Raising the grain intentionally before final sanding is a smart move for anything that’ll see water regularly. It’s a small extra step, but it saves you from a fuzzy surface a few weeks into using the board. Mineral oil and wax blends are also just easier to live with long-term than straight oil soaks — less mess, less reapplication, and food-safe to boot.