So this is absolutely useless. I wasn’t joking. I was bored. So I just decided to make “something.” I’d finished up Cobra Kai the night before (if you haven’t, you’ve made a life mistake) so I guess I had it on the brain. I spent about half an hour manipulating the logo until I really liked it all and then I was stumped… “What do I engrave this onto?!” I had no goal here. Do I use acrylic? I could, but then I’d have to reverse-engrave it and I don’t really feel like reversing the image. Wood? Okay, sure. But then what? Am I making a coaster? Oh, look, I have some cork. Oh! I have those really awesome marble coasters I never tried. Nah… I’m not wasting one of those on a one-off random Cobra Kai moment. And then I just decided I didn’t care. A small token in Thick Cherry Ply will be enough to satisfy me. And here it is… Completely useless. Yet, somehow, completely kickass.
I didn’t do anything on the back. Which, after this came out, I decided was lame. I probably should have put the Miyagi-Do logo on the other side… for balance. After all, that’s what karate’s all about, right? Maybe next time I’m bored.
It’s a token based off the show.
But a game?! Now ya got me thinkin’! A game! I wonder if I could come up with one?! If I did, I think I’d just call it… ALL VALLEY
Seriously? I’ve been noting it on the YouTube feed. Kind of cringed because bullying behavior makes me cringe. Really loved the original movie. Kind of neat to see it resurrected.
What kind of file? How do you make it cut away and leave the letters? Sorry, new forger here and, well, i’m a dumb ass newb when it comes to SVG’s and stuff.
Well, that’s kind of the whole point of all of it, isn’t it. Bullying is bad. I think they’ve really tried to drive that point even better in the series than in the movie. By showing some of the reasons why bullying happens. And showing that bullying can even stem from good intentions. It showed some good lessons there. And, clearly, the characters will all be learning more lessons on that topic. If it wasn’t for the language, I’d encourage my kids to watch it.
I found a version of the logo that I liked online. Just a raster image. I brought it into Photoshop and tweaked it a little to sharpen and clean some elements of it. And I think I added the outer ring to it. Then I brought that into Illustrator and traced that image as pure black and white. I made a copy of it and cutout all of the elements leaving just the ring around the whole thing and just kept that outer stroke as my cut line. And there ya have it.
So, obviously, I could have gone either way… I could have engraved the logo, or embossed it. I decided it’d look best embossed. So the way that happens is simply by coloring. I made the logo white and the background black. By doing that, the white parts aren’t touched at all while the black elements are the sections that are engraved. Because it bothers me that I didn’t do anything on the back of this, I think I’m going to the Miyagi-Do logo on the back. When I do that I’ll make the tree white, and I’ll try making the red moon 50% gray (128,128,128), and, again, the background black. That should give me 3 distinct “levels” and should add another dimension to the design. Hope that makes sense!
