One of my clients, the owner of a tattoo parlor, brought in a piece of flash art that one of his guys drew. He had an idea for an experimental mixed-media piece, and needed help realizing it. So I used google’s photoscan app to digitize the drawing for him.
He took the scan and a piece of Proofgrade maple ply over to another shop in town, and had them print the file onto the wood using a Direct To Garment printer. That was somewhat successful but the ink beaded up quite a bit, especially the black. It might have worked better on unfinished wood, or if they had a dark-garment DTG that could have printed a white base for the colors to sit on. They had also re-sized my file just a little bit, so getting everything lined back up in the GFUI was a bit tricky… I had to use a ruler and very light scoring (just on the masking) to get it as close as I could… and then hit go on a 2 hour engrave (11"x14", SD Engrave). All in all, I’m pretty happy with how well it ended up working out.
I removed the masking with T-Rex tape, which pulled up a bit of the ink on the top of the skull. The masking had also come up at a few spots, but when I went in to try and clean it up with an alcohol-soaked q-tip the ink came off before the wood resin (bright spot behind the skull)
Later I realized I could have added snapmarks to the file before it was printed o the DTG… and then even later realized that would likely still have failed because of them resizing the print.
