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

Jonathan Holt: Week 12 Laser Engraved Skateboard Deck

Concept: I wanted to choose a design I would actually like to have on a skateboard. I decided to go with an altered logo of one of my favorite franchises, Jurassic Park, as well as the two T-rexs from the second move.

Illustrator file

Techniques: I did everything in Illustrator, I grabbed an image and edited it to get rid of any unnecessary spaces that wouldn't transfer well. Then I chose a T-rex picture from Jurassic Park and mirrored it on both sides to fill negative space. I then put the image in black and white and rasterized the image.

Finished board

Materials: We used a blank skateboard deck for this project with a wood finish, however my skating on a traditional skateboard sucks. I may end up putting it on a longboard since that is more my speed.

Valeria Cavazos: Week 11 - Laser Engraving

Concept:

       
          My concept design for my skateboard deck is the Gotham City Sirens because I adore the series of the trio together and separately. I wanted to represent each of the sirens through symbols or objects identifiable to them. 

Technique:

          I created the sketch before uploading it to Illustrator, redrew an outline and later fitting it to the measurements of the skateboard. I tried to make all of the items on the board to interact with one another and accomplished that through making the venus fly trap grabbing hold of everything. I used items that represent each Siren, like jewelry for Catwoman and a hammer for Harley Quinn, rather than drawing the trio. After the redraw of the sketch, I assigned it to the appropriate layering required for the machine shop. Once the file was properly formatted after some help, I sent it to the machine shop. After picking it up from the machine shop, I colored the engraving with colored pencils but tried to maintain as much of the original engraving as possible as an outline. Although a differing subject, the way I colored the skateboard deck is based on the Pokemon tattoo sheet, posted above, in order to try and create the same aesthetic style of a tattoo.

Materials

Engraving

          I used a skateboard deck my friend's dad made, Prismacolor color pencils and a clear acrylic sealer. 

Hannah Barnes: Week 11 - Laser Engraving

Concept:

For my deck, I used a series of designs that I've been iterating over for the past year. The theme is a mixture of technology and steampunk, involving symbols such as gears, the power button, and circuit boards. The top picture depicts one of the triangles (made of cardboard) that I created in the first iteration of the design. The bottom picture shows my second iteration of the design, where I used a CNC machine to cut out designs in wooden triangles. For the skateboard deck, I decided to recreate the designs in square shapes to better fit the board.

Techniques:

I created this design using Adobe Illustrator. I used mainly basic shapes like rectangles and circles and then used the Shape Builder tool to combine the shapes into a single vector shape. After I created the base design, I decided to created a lined background to add depth to the design. I then added the proper colors: a yellow deep cut for the base design and a green medium cut for the lined background. Lastly, I properly formatted the file for laser engraving and sent it off to the machine shop to be engraved.

Material:

I used the recommended skateboard deck for this project, which is a 7.5" Moose Canadian Maple Deck. I liked the default color of the board, so I just applied a clear coat of acrylic spraypaint to finish the deck after engraving it.