Mark Maneja
12 min read
Ten SAU students turned blank guitar kits into playable, personal electric guitars, then played them live at the class's second annual exhibit and jam.
In short: Ten students in ART 4073, Southern Arkansas University's electric guitar building course offered through the Honors College, each turned a blank DIY guitar kit into a playable electric guitar in one spring semester. The finished guitars debuted at the class's second annual Electric Guitar Exhibit and Live Music Jam, where they were played live on stage.
For the second year running, students at Southern Arkansas University started with blank guitar kits, unshaped blocks of wood, and turned them into fully playable electric guitars, each one a reflection of its builder's vision.
Some went bold, with custom shapes and hand-painted artwork. Others kept it clean and classic. Ten blank kits became ten instruments that are unmistakably personal, and every one of them plays.
Every guitar on this page began exactly like this: a blank guitar kit: a flat body blank with the pickup and control cavities already routed, a fretted neck, and a box of hardware. Builders bring the shape, the carving, and the art.
The class behind the project is ART 4073, Southern Arkansas University's Spring 2026 Electric Guitar Building Class, run in the Department of Art & Design and offered through the university's Honors College and led by Professor Nathan Lambert with Mr. Jeff Sumner in the woodshop. Students worked through the complete creative process, from research and sketching to woodworking and final assembly, transforming blank DIY guitar kits into instruments entirely their own. This is the second class to build with our kits: last year's builds earned a feature of their own.
Every builder moved through the same five stages:
History & Research: studying the evolution of the electric guitar and the designs that shaped it.
Ideation & Design: sketching concepts and turning them into working plans.
Building: shaping bodies and necks with bandsaws, spindle sanders, rasps, and routers.
Finishing: sanding, sealing, staining, and painting each custom look.
Setup: wiring, installing hardware, and dialing in the action for real playability.
Start with the same blank canvas. The unshaped body and headstock kits these students used are the ones we stock, ready for you to carve, finish, and make your own. Shop blank guitar kits.
Each guitar reflects its maker's personal style and the skills they gained along the way. Meet the ten instruments and the students who built them.
Purple is Mercy’s favorite color and, in her words, she will always sparkle on, so she set out to build a sparkly purple butterfly guitar. She planned to use loose glitter over the paint, then fell for a color-shifting glitter spray paint and made that the star, piling loose glitter on top anyway for maximum shine. Unapologetically glam, it takes its name from Barbie Mariposa and Her Butterfly Fairy Friends, and from the Spanish word for butterfly.
Built as a gift for her older brother, Nikki’s single-cut classic solid-body build shifts from blue to purple across the face, with gold-to-purple hand-painted accents in the carved scrollwork and a walnut-stained, worn-look back. “Love” is carved into the headstock, the shorthand she and her brother use for “I love you”, and his initials, “B.J.,” are carved into the face.
Christian kept it classic and simple: a clean single-cutaway body that celebrates the natural wood grain, sealed with a rich stain and an oil-and-wax finish. A last-minute gamble on an ogee router-bit edge became one of his favorite details. He named it “Iteration I” as the first in a series he hopes to keep building.
Harrison landed early on the shape he wanted, a standard body and headstock, and let a clean red-to-black burst finish do the talking. He’s proudest of how the body turned out, smoothed with a palm sander until there was nothing he’d change. The name? Just because he thought “Sebastian” was a funny name for a guitar.
Lex wanted something that stood out without straying too far from an ST Style silhouette, and landed on a striking black-and-white scheme. A skull logo adorns the headstock, and the body’s round, angular, bony horns earned it the name “The Skelecaster,” a nod both to the artwork and to the model it started as.
Liz chose the classic double-cutaway shape for its iconic look, then made it personal: hand-carved Japanese maple leaves flow across the body and headstock, based on a tree that stood in front of her childhood home. An ebony-stained neck meets a spray-painted ivory headstock. She named it “Deja” for the memories woven through every step of the build.
MyliePiper came in with no woodworking experience and left with a bright, cheery build, sunflowers carved into the body and headstock, then hand-painted over a spray-painted blue base. The carving was her toughest challenge and, once finished, the first moment she felt good about her guitar. It’s a build that pushed her far outside her comfort zone.
Joshlin’s build features a CNC-cut vector design across the lower body, vectors she made with help from classmate Maria Womack after learning about CNC machines in class. Dedicated to her brother, it carries a quote from him on the back, written in his own handwriting. She named it “Twin Flame” in honor of their relationship.
Skylar’s guitar is an homage to nature, finished with a color-shifting effect she discovered by accident while experimenting with spray-paint gradients. Layered gloss-and-satin finishes give it a sleek look, and she let the wood grain show through the paint as a tribute to the tree it came from. It’s named for rock-and-roll pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Maria’s guitar has a reversed star shape all her own, with a color-changing LED strip set into a cavity she routed into the back. Rather than a bulky plastic pickguard, she designed a custom lion-shaped one over the ombre wood-stain body, a nod to Jesus, the Lion of Judah. She named it “Jubilee” (“Julie” for short) after the Old Testament celebration announced with the blast of a horn; she wants the guitar, like her life, to always point back to God.
When the builds were finished, the guitars left the studio for the class's Electric Guitar Exhibit & Live Music Jam, held May 4th at the SAU Alumni Center. Each one stood on display beside its builder's photos, sketches, and the story of how it came together. Friends, families, and neighbors moved down the tables, reading the placards and leaning in for a closer look at the finishes and shapes.
Inside, the builders took the mic one by one to introduce the instruments they'd made. Ten guitars, from glitter-soaked and LED-lit builds to sleek natural-wood finishes, each carrying its own story and its maker's name. For all of them it was the payoff to a full semester of work: standing beside a guitar they had shaped, finished, and wired with their own hands.
Then the night opened up. Outside at the pavilion, builders and guests plugged in for a live jam, the same handmade guitars now ringing out through the amps. As the sun dropped behind the trees, the crowd settled into their chairs (a few four-legged fans included) and the instruments finally got to do what they were built for.
A project like this doesn't happen without the instructors who guide it and the people who support it behind the scenes.
Professor Nathan Lambert, Course Instructor
Mr. Jeff Sumner, Machinist and Woodshop Mentor
Professor Lambert and Mr. Sumner have built the Electric Guitar Building Class into more than its name suggests. Each student runs a real project from first sketch to the live show, and picks up skills that carry into any field: project management, woodworking, electronics, finishing, and instrument setup. It is one of the most engaging, forward-thinking courses we have seen built around our kits, and the results on this page speak for themselves.
A special thank you to every student who built their own guitar from scratch: Mercy McGee, Nikki Scercy, Christian Coppersmith, Harrison Taylor, Lex Jones, Liz Attebery, MyliePiper Thomas, Joshlin Wiggins, Skylar Montgomery, and Maria Womack. Their creativity, patience, and craftsmanship brought these instruments to life.
Every photo in this feature was provided by Professor Lambert and the Electric Guitar Building Class: the in-class build shots, the studio portraits, and the photos from the exhibit and live jam. Thank you for documenting the semester so well and for letting us share it.
More from campus: SAU's Honors College shared its own recap of the exhibit and concert, and the university's Stater magazine featured the program in “Honors Amplified”.
Strip away the paint and this course is a semester of applied problem solving. The builders researched instrument history, turned sketches into working plans, shaped bodies and necks with bandsaws, spindle sanders, rasps, and routers, then finished, wired, and set up their instruments to play in tune. That is design thinking, materials science, woodworking, and electronics in one university project, and the proof of work is an instrument you can plug in and play.
It is why we built a STEM program around hands-on guitar projects for schools and universities: the learning sticks because the guitar is real.
Ten students started the semester with blank kits and ended it at their own live show, with stage-ready instruments they had shaped, finished, and wired themselves. That is the idea behind this course, and behind our kits: you learn a craft by building the real thing.
To Professor Lambert, Mr. Sumner, and the whole ART 4073 class: thank you for building with us again. We can't wait to see what next year's students make.
Build your own from scratch. Grab a blank DIY guitar kit and start your own build from the same blank canvas these students began with.
Yes. Blank kits arrive with the hard machining already done: the pickup and control cavities are routed and the neck comes fretted. Builders focus on shape, finish, and assembly, and all ten guitars in this class came out playable.
ART 4073 is Southern Arkansas University's electric guitar building course, run in the Department of Art & Design, offered through the Honors College, and led by Professor Nathan Lambert with Mr. Jeff Sumner in the woodshop. Students take a blank kit from research and sketches to a playable instrument in one semester.
A flat body blank with the pickup and control cavities already routed, a fretted neck, and the hardware the build needs. The shape, the carving, the artwork, and the final assembly are up to the builder. The kit day photos above show the exact starting point.
This course runs one spring semester from first sketch to the exhibit stage. Students build alongside their regular coursework, with time for custom shaping, hand-painted artwork, and finishing.
Yes. Southern Arkansas University's guitar-building course has now produced two years of stage-ready builds, and high schools like Calloway County High School (KY) have brought class sets of our kits into their classrooms too, with many more schools ordering in bulk every year. Our STEM program for schools and universities covers kit selection and bulk pricing for classrooms.
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