Week 12 Laser Engraving Skateboard Deck - Twinkle Shah

Concept

My concept is based on a raster illustration I created for a poetry book that I co-wrote and illustrated, called Catharsis. This illustration is of a bee going "home" into his hive, which is on a branch. This was the illustration for the first chapter, titled "storge." Storge is the Greek word for familial love. In the poetry book, it is described as an "at home" feeling. I thought this illustration would look great as an engraving and it happened to fit the dimensions of the engravable space of the skateboard deck well. 

storge - illustration from catharsis. 

Technique

I decided to turn the raster-based illustration that I created using the brush tool in Photoshop, into a vector drawing in Illustrator. I used the image trace command and changed all the components into vectors, and then made the stroke 0.01 in. I ended up having to delete the layers that contained all the roses and rose buds, because they were problematic with the image trace command, probably since they were too detailed. The image trace command was tedious to deal with, but I was finally able to make it work, and I changed the colors of the strokes to get a bit of variance in the depth of the engravings. 
 

Illustrator file for laser engraving

Materials

The illustration was engraved onto the middle of a white skateboard deck. Overall, I am quite happy with the result, and I am excited to try new laser engraving projects. 

Laser engraved skateboard deck