WARRENSBURG — The devil, it is said, is in the details.

But woodworker and artist Ron Atteberry finds it angelically simple to apply fine hand-carved decoration to the superb wood chests and other furniture items he builds.

Visitors to Atteberry’s tidy garage workshop in Warrensburg will instead find numerous devils liberated from the details and grinning back at them from spine-tingling portraits executed in combinations of magic marker and colored pencil.

Atteberry, who has a fine eye for pretty girl model photographs he also likes to keep on the walls, prefers to use his own drawing talents to picture some pretty fierce, but strangely fun, creatures he pulls out of his imagination. It’s the kind of screaming skull stuff that would sell well at biker rallies, if he ever makes it to one.

“I like hot rods, and I love going to hot rod shows,” says Atteberry, 63. “But I’m no biker; if I got on one of those things, I’d fall off.”

In any case, demonic retailing would cut down on his furniture-making time, and Atteberry, a retired cabinet maker who loves to sketch, still thinks his woodworking skills offer him the strongest shot at nailing a few customer dollars. His particular forte is what he calls “hope chests,” which are like big trunks and measure about 39 inches long, 20 inches deep and 25 inches tall.

They feature precisely fitting lids, sometimes painstakingly built up from applied wood strips, while the outside of the pine chests provide him with an expansive wood canvas with which to play: no devils here, but instead hand-cut flowers, hearts and stars sliced in with a utility knife that needs a blade change about every 15 minutes to keep up with the cutting edge of his talent.

He experiments with different paints and finishes to highlight his work and achieves pleasing fusions of shadings of red, black, chocolate and other hues that go very easy on the eye. His furniture creativity has extended to entertainment centers and chest-and-drawer combination pieces where the drawer fronts are all decorated with carvings. His prices are surprisingly reasonable, too. A chest that takes him five days to build (the hand-carved feet alone are half a day’s labor) and costs him $130 in materials will go on sale for just $260.

“People don’t realize how much time goes into all this,” he says. “But I enjoy the work, and I just want to get back what I’ve got in it and have a little money to go out and buy more wood and materials.”

Perhaps his biggest fan is his mom, Catherine Atteberry, who says his drawings may be “kind of weird,” but her resilient son, who survived a bout with cancer in 2007 and needed surgery for heart trouble in January, deserves a break.

“I just think his furniture and everything should be seen,” she added. “He does beautiful work.”

And not only is it pretty to look at, but the devil himself would have a hard time breaking any of it. The builder has proved this by climbing to the top of his garage roof and hurling one of his hope chests down to his concrete driveway, just to see how well-built it really was.

“It scratched it all up, but it never fell apart,” he recalls with pride. “It was solid.”

treid@herald-review.com|421-7977