Engraving for a stamp

I am trying to make a stamp for a friend to stamp words into her pottery. I have designed this file in Illustrator, but I can’t figure out how to make it so the word is raised and not engraved. In other words, I want everything but the word to be engraved. Also, I know I need to mirror (correct term?) it before I engrave it. Or am I making this too difficult and there is an easier way to make this?

You need to invert the colors. The machine will engrave the dark areas (you should make it black), and skip white.
image

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I’ll add, I’m no stamp expert, but I can’t see it maintaining those fine details unless you’re making it out of something sturdy like delrin or acrylic.

You can use your image editing app to soften the edges (think neon glow) which will leave more support material around stuff like that.

You need to do this in Photoshop (or GIMP).

I should have uploaded a screenshot of my file. That’s basically what it looks like except my background is blue and I forgot to mirror the image. The screenshot I shared was after I had uploaded the file into the Glowforge app. The pink color of the word threw me because I thought it would engrave the word and nothing else.

Illustrator does have raster effects like glow so OP can stay in AI. They’re a little more finicky than in Photoshop. Rasterize a copy of that artwork before sending to GF though or GFUI won’t interpret properly.

Thanks! Thinking of using acrylic.

Sounds like you still had it as a vector with fill. The UI ignores color for vector engraves.

You can use a vector but it needs to be “cut” from the surrounding shape. It will look like this in the UI when Engrave is selected:

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Ohhhh, gotcha! Thanks!

One more question: This worked, but did not cut the rectangle out of the sheet of acrylic. In my original file, I had applied a stroke to cut. Did I miss something?

You just need that additional rectangle aligned with the edge of the engraved area.

I’ll give it a try, thanks!

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