Tile and vintage blueprints make a great combo

10x14 ceramic tile from Lowes. Used a black paint pen - wound up doing two passes of painting the engrave and wiping with generic magic erasers. Looks great next to a few bookcases with old camera equipment that I have.

Edit: corrected “magic marker” to “magic eraser”.

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Awesome! :grinning:

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Looks great!

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That looks so great! Can you give more details about the laser settings and paint filling technique you used?

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My process for this piece:

  1. Found free vintage camera blueprint on web
  2. Used photoshop to remove the yellowish background and had to split each figure into it’s own file as all together the glowforge wouldn’t accept it since it was too big.
  3. In Illustrator, I then put the 3 figures and signature area into a 10x14 rectangle and added the font at the top
  4. Each of the figures took about 1 hour to engrave, so I did them over the course of a day while I was doing other things. In total, it was about 4 hours engraving for the entire tile.
    4a. 1000 speed, full power, 450 DPI, Vary power for the engrave
  5. Once I had finally engraved the whole thing, I did the following on each section (did one section completely and then moved to the next):
    5a. took a black paint pen and rubbed it all over the engraved areas - you will, of course, get paint on the still glazed areas. I’d try to avoid getting paint all over the glazed area as it does take some time to remove it, but you need to paint all the engraved areas
    5b. Then I used a damp magic eraser to just lightly remove the paint from the glazed areas - leaving paint in the engraved areas. This took a while per section - maybe 15-20 minutes just gently running the magic eraser over the section I painted in 5a.
  6. I did #5 twice for each section as I had wiped away a little bit too much paint in the engrave the first time.

I learned so much from this thread - Etching Tile

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I love the way this turned out. Thanks for sharing the process. You may also like looking up old patents for cameras. Someone in the forum posted that suggestion a while back and there is a treasure trove of images there!

I love the look of patent prints … very nice!

Really great engrave. I’m finding line drawings are great for tiles.

Do you think the 450dpi made a huge difference over a lower dpi? I’ve done tiles with lower, but they weren’t as big.

I am not sure about the dpi making a difference or not. It is the value I use for all my tiles, so never tried anything else. :grinning:

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Love this.

You might want to test a small tile with a lower DPI. The engrave will take a LOT less time, so it’s worth it if it still looks good to you.

Clear instructions thank you.