Ryland Smith Week 12 Laser Engrave Skateboard

Concept: I like the idea of synergizing with the skate community that is free form and intuitively inspired so I created a bit of a psychedelic design with the whimsical tag, "We Did It". "We did what" you ask... like I said on the board, "We Did It".

AI File

Techniques: I used Illustrator to make the design. I traced an image of the board and scaled it for the reference layer. I pulled in a design of a cow elk I made in photoshop as a raster engrave. I then formed the various shapes and set a fill at the same color with the stroke at .01. The laser engraver ends up forming the fill in raster but the edges are crisp using the vector stoke on the edge. After it was engraved the, "W" in "We Did It" had disappeared. So I masked off the letters and spray painted. There was bleed through the mask so I took a sharpie and outlined the text adding more contrast. Then I did a coat of polyurethane. After that coat dried I again went over the outline of the text with a sharpie and finally added a second thicker coat of polyurethane.

Mask

Just after spray paint

First coat polyurethane 

Materials: Baltic Birch Wood,  white spray paint color works well on wood, black sharpie for rich black outline of text, semi-glossy polyurethane. 

Final Board