Amazing engraving and request for help

I’ve become a bit obsessed with the engravers dungeon recently and their amazing artworks. I had to figure out how it was done so I set about on a quest to achieve some similar results on my own laser cutter. I even wrote it all up in words on my blog.
Skulls and Engraving!

I’d also like a bit of help, given my apparent lack of a Glowforge and the imminent announcement of extended delays for international customers it appears I’m going to be without a machine for a long time to come. I was wondering if @dan or someone else would be willing to try some of this engraving for me. The Glowforge looks to have amazing potential with line artwork judging by some of the posts round here but my 100W machine just blasts the details to bits. (I also expect any 70cm tube machine like the glowforge would be better for this kind of detail). Drop me a line if anyone wants to collaborate with me.

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Sure. I’ll give it a go. Let me know what you’d like me to do exactly.

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Same here I love this stuff too and would like to help make some :japanese_ogre:

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The time zones are an issue or I’d let you use mine. It’s really handy to do iterations to see what works & what doesn’t. But we’re 5hrs behind you so there’d be no one here to push the blinking button when you’re awake & about.

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I’ll volunteer also, Killer design.

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WOW! This work is drool-worthy. Can’t wait to hear what you learn.

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Wow, you’re off to a great start! The artist Diego Scaglia Rat is my favorite laser artists and it’s pretty much the master and this technique. We might already know this, but he’s he’s also pretty free with giving details about his workflow. If you search out his name you’ll find a couple of YouTube videos showing how he does it. Very time-consuming stuff, but man, are his results amazing!

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I spoke to him via chat and he was a bit cagey about his secret sauce (understandably).

His you tube channel does have a few videos about preparing artwork, it looks as though it’s just standard engraving that he waxes and finishes neatly. All the videos show a light engraving and then cut back to something significantly darker.

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@scatterbrains jumped straight up to give it a try which was awesome.

Apparently the cloud was unable to process the engraving from the vector artwork so went back to do the work in inkscape instead.

The files are on my blog post if anyone else wants to give it a try, you may have to break the image up into smaller parts that the machine can handle. You should be able to realign part images based on fiducial marks right? :stuck_out_tongue:

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This was initially accomplished by taking the file into Inkscape and using “create a bitmap copy” for just the skull/curly decorations because the cloud didn’t seem to want to process them. I lined this up with the vector art rather than what was done on the wood.

However, it works fine if you wait long enough on the “Preparing Your Design” screen. So, it seems my impatience got the better of me. To be fair, I think it says something about how complicated designs can take up to five minutes and this took longer.

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On the Glowforge, you can get much better halftoning results by just importing a high resolution raster and letting it do its own thing. There is no need to do any preprocessing.

That’s not what I was doing here, the intention is to vector cut the halftone effect so it does need additional processing in this case.

Ended up taking about 10 minutes for the cloud software to process the skull/decoration vector. The skull was scored with the automagical light score setting. It ended up dark, so I wiped it down with some isopropyl alcohol. That smeared the cheap acrylic paint I was using around a bit, but here’s how that turned out. Also, I nudged things when I painted the skull.


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Very nice, precisely as expected much more control over the laser beams than my 100W tube. I have a very burnt dent in the middle of my skull, yours has only just started to get there.

I’m still in the process of resurrecting my other laser cutter (it’s all there it’s mostly me being lazy), but I know that cuts at 150mm/s and has a similar 30/35W tube to the glowforge so I would hope to get something similar on there. Will post pics when it happens.

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