I can appreciate that. I plan to use sand shading, but I want it to be subtle, as you said. I think overdone sand shading becomes more pyrography than marquetry and I don’t want that to happen. I do love how it can bring life to a marquetry when well done.
The one problem with sand shading as I see it is the difficulty in controlling it, especially when it is somewhere away from the edges. I have a soup spoon for that the I have squeezed together in my vise/vice, ha, ha, to give it a funnel shape towards the tip.
Mike, an American living in Norway