First attempt at layers!

Made on a Glowforge
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Thanks!! :blush: I have some editing I need to do as the lines were cut a little too fine!! Overall I am very pleased

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Thank you!!! :heart_eyes:

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Thank you!! Some of the projects are taking longer than I had anticipated but I am happy overall. It’s been a nice extension from my pen and ink drawings

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Well, i think the first attempt is amazing. I really love your work!

Yeah it’s very different to go from the screen to the GF. What looks like it will be fine sometimes isn’t. I have been using illustrator since 88. It is my favorite program.

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Now I know who to ask if I have questions :wink: have been using illustrator for about a year… but didn’t become a serious relationships until the last month :crazy_face: I love it too at times. Reducing points for me is the biggest struggle and a lot has to be done manually with my work. :sob:

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Very creative - nice work. The small details really make the epic interesting to see.

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Yeah those damn anchor points are a PITA. Have you tried the simplify tool? when working with many curved lines you can have a lot of anchors. The simplify tool works pretty well but can be a bit of trial and error. Like anything, you get out what you put in, so I don’t mind spending a few hours working on an image to get the perfect fit between my art and what the GF will handle. The best thing I learned was the fewer points on curves the better and they actually come out smoother. I mean for a circle you only have 4 anchors so we can definitely bring down the amount of anchors. Please let me know if you need any help at all.

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I have been drawing my work on my iPad Pro with adobe draw and then exporting into illustrator. I find my details can’t be captured by image trace. Even with tweaking the levels I think I have found the details limit. My bear and salmon piece drawn in adobe draw and imported into illustrator was 450,000 points to start… then I used the smooth tool… line by line to smooth out… I also had a lot of black in the original so I had to really lessen the black to get a decent result. The salmon pictured above was also drawn in adobe but much easier to fix!!

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I know it will take longer but if you import the drawing on one layer then lock it and create a layer above you can just trace with the pencil tool and fix the points as you go. Remember to make the entire drawing a compound path before saving as an svg or GF will put the different shapes on different cut layers in the gui.

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In Illustrator, use the Simplify tool instead of the smoothing tool - it will be a lot quicker.

Object > Path > Simplify. You can adjust how much you want to simplify the paths, but even 98% or 99% is going to knock out a ton of points and it doesn’t lose much detail.

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Yeah i realized I typed smooth when I meant simplify. LOL I need more coffee! I have corrected my post.

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Been there done that! (Like already this morning.) :smile:

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If I didn’t spend so many hours at night designing and reading posts on this forum, I think I might be awake. LOL

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Simplify works …sometimes… other times it really jacks it up!! I have been using the tool… it does help with an initial clean up for sure!!

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I love the Pacific Northwest art style!

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Beautiful work. And now I’m feeling terribly homesick…

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Oh man! So sorry. Where are you from?

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me too :heart:

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Great blend of design elements! Nice work!

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Grew up in Anchorage and Chugiak (when it was a distant village, not a suburb!).

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