Inlay phoenix

No stains, all natural wood colors:

Baltic base
Orange Osage tail
Bloodwood body
Purpleheart wisps

Cut outline, adjust all interior parts for kerf. Voila, friction fit. Quick hit of oil to bring out the colors, and pretty much done.

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That Bloodwood is gorgeous! Dang! :smile:

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i’m not sure how the colors came out the way they did…?..very very nice piece…!

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Those woods are all naturally those colors. I had very little to do with it :slight_smile:

Edit: all the colored wood was sourced from Woodcraft. Baltic can be gotten almost anywhere.

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Came out gorgeous! Are you applying 3M tape to the back of your sourced veneers before you cut? Or are you just gluing them in after the cut.

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Not veneers, everything is 1/8”. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle in a way. Added benefit: it’s double sided. This is the top side, this is proof of concept for a larger piece, I moved quickly and didn’t mask things so the back is a bit scorched.

I mention it because the “back” will be the front side going forward — the fit is much tighter in back due to the shape of the kerf, so there is a much smaller black border between pieces on the other side.

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Is there a tutorial somewhere addressing kerf?

This is awesome

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There are lots of different methods documented if you search for “kerf”, but I used the path thickness method in Inkscape as posted here:

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Wow, lovely job!

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Rats, I gotta learn another program. Photoshop, Illustrator, and now Inkscape.

The good news is that illustrator and inkscape do almost identical things. Each is slightly better at one or two tasks than the other, but ultimately it’s a wash. You definitely don’t need to learn both right off the bat, and Inkscape definitely has the advantage on price (as in free).

The same can be said of Gimp, it’s a pretty capable photoshop clone – learn one or the other to start probably – and Gimp is free. I’ve never tried Krita, but I hear good things (https://krita.org/en/).

If I were going to learn stuff, I’d go with Fusion3d and Inkscape and Gimp to start before you decide to get sucked into the Adobe ecosystem. Of course if you already own the adobe creative suite, then have at it.

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No, no, no …kerf adjustment is MUCH easier in Illustrator! We have a separate tutorial for AI here:

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You can set Inkscape step size to a kerf and do similar work using the inset/outset commands, though it’s a bit buggy. The stroke to path method is way more reliable.

This shows that each program has things that it does better or worse than the other. Illustrator exports SVGs with janky extraneous nodes at corners sometimes, etc. My point was that if you’re coming in cold and have to pick a starter set, I’d lean toward free software. Once you get good at Inkscape, all your skills will translate pretty well to Illustrator and likewise with Gimp to Photoshop.

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Totally agree. :slightly_smiling_face:

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You know I never did follow up with the final piece, an iPad stand, about 7x9" (177x230mm).

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Too pretty to cover up! :wink:

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That’s gorgeous!

Beautiful piece!

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