First, do a material test to find out the settings to score the wood and then the settings to cut through the wood. If you don't have a big enough sheet to cut everything out just put some characters on another layer. On the cutting layer I gave it one extra pass to make sure it cut through. Go ahead and cut everything out. (Be careful some pieces are fragile)

Now after you have cut everything be careful separating the pieces from the sheet of wood, some pieces can get caught up with the sheet of wood and break off. Make sure that you clear out the cut-out holes on each piece. Lightly wipe both sides of each piece of soot and dust so you can get a nice smooth paint job on them. (Be careful some pieces are fragile)

Now with painting the pieces we used paint, but you could use markers as well (just watch out with markers bleeding into the wood). We painted both sides but only one side has detail, so the back we just painted roughly the colors we painted the front. We painted the base blue to represent the sea.

Now we used fishing string and glue to put everything together, but I believe you can use something else to hang them from the base to make it look cleaner. Each character has up to two holes to hang them up with the string. Looking at the base you will see sets of holes, each set is for one character. So, you will have 3 sets on the outer rim of the base and 3 sets in a smaller circle near the center. Secure each character to the base using fishing string or anything else you would like to use. 

The last part is to attach the ring so you can hang this beautiful piece of art up to display. I use the 3 sets of holes on the outside rim of the base. You should have 3 pieces of string attached to the base and then attached them to the ring. Try and make sure these 3 pieces are equal in length so once the art is hung the base will be level.

Creating this was a lot of fun and the time making something like this. I hope you enjoy it as much as my wife does. 

A couple of things I would change would be the fishing string, I would try and find a thinner string that is more pliable. The character pieces are very light so I would find some kind of thin weight to glue to the bottom back of each character piece to weigh them down. If you use weight, then that might fix the problem with the fishing string. You will notice when you cut these pieces out some pieces are thin and or fragile, to fix this you can make everything bigger. 

I hope you all enjoy this piece, please leave a comment if you download it and make your own. I would love to see other versions of this made by our community. Enjoy