Bison!
Thanks to an immensely generous forum member, I was able to not only check out and play around with the GFUI using the Forge with a Friend feature but I was also able to run through and print a file!
While on my way to my nephews birthday dinner, a private message popped up that some scrap Proofgrade maple was sitting in the bed and asked if I wanted to run anything. I turned around. Sorry, nephew! Eleven isn’t that big of a birthday anyways… kidding. Headed to dinner and then back home and luckily that piece of maple was still sitting there.
In between bites of my chicken florentine crepes, I was thinking about what I should run. I have a pretty decent mental catalog of images that I’ve taken over the years and my thoughts kept going back to an American Bison image that I made a few years back at Theodore Roosevelt National Park which is located near Medora, ND (if you haven’t been, it’s well worth the trip - a very underrated park!).
The thing about engravings, to me, is that they are difficult to envision what they will look like… well, engraved. I can envision pretty well how stuff will come out printed on canvas, wood, matte paper, metallic paper, etc. but the laser engraving is something totally new. And specialty mediums like wood, and glass require very specific images to work well in that medium. Not only does the subject matter need to be right, the image needs to be one that works with the constraints/features/limitations of the medium.
Hello, automagic, medium engrave settings. I didn’t want to waste the material I was so generously allowed to use, so I just went with straight automagic settings on this little piece; I placed and scaled the image in Illustrator and added a small cutbox around the borders and off we went; as simple as that.
Which was based on this image:
Overall - this is a tough wait. And it seems that the wait has been growing exponentially tougher just over the past few weeks for whatever reason. But, being able to just push this through with automagic and be done is really freakin’ cool.