Newbie- Leather Engraving/ Procreate Questions

Hi y’all,

I’m a newbie to the glowforge and am slowly getting acclimated. I’ve been working on a few projects with varying success- I’d love any pointers on making consistently high quality leather engravings!

I’ve been engraving original artwork made with procreate (saved as a jpeg file) onto the covers of moleskin journals. Often, the engraving will be spot on- but sometimes, quite unexpectedly, the image will look quite grainy and granulated. I’m wondering if this is due to how the file is saved? Maybe it’s from the type of brush used in procreate? Potentially due to using the glowforge for long stretches of time, creating prints back to back too many times?

Any and all leatherwork

tips would be appreciated!! Thanks!

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I can’t answer your leather questions, but welcome! There are so many experts here. Someone will surely be around to help soon.

Can you post a picture of the art used to make that engrave - since we can’t tell what’s intentional and what’s grainy!

In really general answers, dirty lenses, being out of focus, and weirdness in your material can all lead to unexpected results.

In your picture it does look like I can make out “pixels” in the lines engraved on your leather.

This likely points to either:

  1. your artwork is lower resolution than it could/should be
  2. your engrave settings are a lower lines-per-inch (LPI) than necessary

I’m not familiar with Procreate, but you might try making sure you export at a higher resolution. This might mean you need to author your stuff when you’re drawing it at a higher resolution.

One other suggestion is your artwork looks like line-art, in which you might have more flexibility if you drew in a vector art program (Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape). At least for line-art like you showed here, you could use scores instead of engraves, and get your lasering done much-much-much faster.

Good luck!

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Unfortunately this question is outside our team’s scope. I’ve moved it to the Beyond the Manual so the discussion can continue there.

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