Hey all, this is a work in progress as a painting, but the laser component is complete. I first designed what I wanted to paint, then created just a pure outline in Affinity (yay free tools!). The canvas I’m painting is 16x20, so while I have a Glowforge Pro what made the most sense was to split the image vertically and complete it in two passes.
The canvas is primed with normal white acrylic paint, and then I sprayed a thin but opaque coating of Montana BLACK spray paint (navy blue to serve as the medium ground for the painting). I then had the Glowforge engrave away just the outlines. In total, each half took about 20 minutes, meaning a total of about 40 minutes of engraving total. It worked flawlessly.
Now, normally people advise going fast and high power to do this, but I couldn’t go too fast because that would reduce the work-area for the laser, so I instead went low power low speed. Speed was 1000, power was 40, and 75 lines per inch.
