I don’t have a pro so I just set the seam to run along the lines from the photo (Which is here if anyone wants to play along at home).
If/when I cut this again I will likely mask, cut , then peel and engrave. The smoke damage seemed to fuse with the paint and got a bit muddy when I tried to clean it off.
Just making sure I understood - did you engrave the painted surface without masking? From your comment, it sounds like it.
I’ve done a fair amount of that, you don’t need much power to remove the paint, so you can get good results without producing the usual smoke debris, and don’t have to worry about masking.
For the cut, however, something I tried is to run a score over the painted part, then mask just that line with regular painters masking tape (I used the blue stuff). Then cut, peel off the masking, then engrave the unmasked painted surface. I would do it that way again…
Yeah the line in the middle when it’s glowing does give it that look. Now that I think about it, you know what would be really cool? Since the paint itself is transparent in daylight, I can engrave the moon on it and then come back and paint the Death Star on it. Moon by day, Death Star by night.
