Been lurking for a while again because holiday distractions have slaughtering my time to work on projects, still, made this as a housewarming present for my sister and her husband and I think it turned out shareworthy 
Design was thought up by my wife, my other sister handled linework, and I did shading to give it some pop in the burn process. Otherwise just a standard engrave and score job (like to keep the outlines deep and dark).
That came out nice.
Nice crest! (And love the phrase!) 
I love the way you combined the engraves and scores in this!
Also the fade you managed with the wood grain around the edges!
Wow, outstanding! I’d love to hear more about how you did the shading—it’s so subtle.
Sure, it wasn’t anything fancy and I cheated a little 
Line work was uploaded into my editing program. I do color work in Paint.Net rather than GiMP which is more popular but same concept (free, layers, limited filter functions, etc.). Added 2 layers above the linework layer, one for each blocked shade (there was a light grey and a dark grey for the shield/helmet and deep shadows in the folds and so on) and set the layers to ‘Multiply’ so I could still see the linework below for painting and then cleaning up where I colored outside the lines.
Last layer went below the everything else and was a radial gradient from black to white centered on, well, the center. I then used the linework layer as a guide to clean out any space that it would’t be seen. This also could have been done by filling the line layer with white in those spots, but it was a coin flip as to which was more work so I usually err on not touching my lines layer.
Exported to .png, imported to my .svg in inkscape on a second layer, made sure everything lined up good and uploaded to the GF to do the voodoo it do.
Here is where I cheated: Nothing says I have to accept the shading the way it was burned in. A little sandpaper can go a long way to remove color on a burn for a wood as light as this. I usually hit my engraves with a quick pass of the sander at 220 grit just so take off scorch marks where i was to lazy to mask, but it worked awesome to play around the edges with and really feather that gradient out 
Aha! Thanks for sharing your process.
I wouldn’t call that cheating any more than I would call using masking cheating. Less, actually.
