I have found that most craft stores (like Michael's) and hobby shops carry a line of wood from Midwest -- balsa, basswood, and some other dark woods that I can't identify. A few years ago I bought a very thin sheet (probably as thin as an index card) of some kind of dark wood from Midwest, in the local Michael's, and I cut it into plank strips to make a bulkhead for a barge slip. Here is a photo, you can see the planks lining the bulkhead vertically. When you put a clear coat on it, the texture in the wood comes up nice. I also took a black permanent marker and colored the edges of each plank to make each one standout against the one next to it.
