Hello everyone!
My name is Shell, and I just started here at Glowforge last week.
I used to make art for video games, and before that I was in the animation/visual effects industry…and now I get to make art with lasers! When I don’t make digital art, I’m usually crafting/making something at home. You guys can see some of my work here: http://shellmeggersee.crevado.com/
I was playing around with a design for some earrings that I got to engrave on the Glowforge last week. Have a look, I’d love to hear what you guys think.
I like tiny small things with lots of detail, so this was a fun first test. The larger red wood engraving ended up getting broken after the engraving, but I wanted to share how the design looks without any treatment on top.
Welcome to the forum!
Wow, awesome work! Did the smaller ones have different depth engravings, or did you just finish it differently from the red one? Or are my eyes just playing tricks on me?
I can’t see your portfolio at work, I’ll have to check it out when I get home!
Thanks! I designed this for some of my family members. I can’t take full credit for its construction, an artist named Wanaree Tanner helped me immensely, once I knew what I wanted to make. (Check out her AMAZING work here:Wanaree Tanner) But its made out of silver and copper metal clay. The pattern inside is inspired by Ndebele art (a tribe native to Southern Africa) and was engraved on stamp material with a laser engraver, which is then stamped into the clay while it is still wet. You fire each piece separately and then very painstakingly weld/file everything together.
@joe The smaller ones have a product called Rub N Buff on them. Its a furniture wax that comes in lots of colors. I like it because it really brings out the details on small pieces. The engrave depth is actually the same, but the wood is darker, so with that and the metallic overlay it looks quite different!
@Shell those are very pretty!
I looked at the image full resolution and it seems as if the engraving is a bit ragged (like the lines are a little wiggly). Was that vector art or a raster image? Also, would you be able to tell us if these were made on a “production” unit, or are you still using one of the original prototype machines?
Josh, let me take that one - the software Shell was using was rasterizing at 72 dpi before exporting, which is pretty janky. Right now the machines around the office are all different assemblages of parts, so there’s no name (“prototype” or “production”) that maps to any given machine’s collection of components.
More generally, engraving takes an immense amount of tweaking and subtlety and can be wrecked at any point from the source bitmap to the hardware. We started tuning our production toolchain a bit but there’s a long way to go before we’re happy with it.
Thank you Dan. I had guessed that it was raster art, and do I understand the difficulties of dealing with resolution as it maps to the “real world”. I am looking forward to playing with this, and since one of our many applications round here will be letterpress, the raster quality is going to be important!
Very artistic. This was going to be one of my first experiments with the GF. Do you have any tricks you can share with us. Where are you getting your stock from?
The engrave depth is actually the same, but the wood is darker, so with that and the metallic overlay it looks quite different!