Concept:
For my Laser Engraving Project I decided to use an outline of a sculpture that I had made in a previous sculpture class. I really like the expression in the sculpture and I think the lines across this cat's face will turn out interesting when engraved into wood. This project is supposed to show the life of an aggressive alley cat. I got inspiration from Jordan Debney when creating this, since he has a variety of thick lined drawings that have a similar expression. His art work can be found on Instagram or online.
http://jordandebney.com/
Techniques:
I used a bamboo tablet on Photoshop and traced the image directly. I went back and added cross hatching to indicate the dark spots and shadows on the cat. For the background, I looked up images of trashcans, milk cartons, fish bones, rotten bananas, and yarn. For the banana, milk carton, and trashcan, I directly traced a .png. For the rest I took creative license to make the fish bones and yarn, since those are a lot less simple.
Materials:
I will be using my cherry plywood to engrave this image. I am thinking of painting sections after with some acrylic or gouache paint. I plan to paint the eyes green, the fur white, and the tongue a bright pink. For the background, I will paint a section of the milk carton blue and white. The banana will be yellow with brown showing through. The trashcan I might paint a silver color if I have that in acrylics. I will leave the fish bone alone and I will paint the yarn with orange.
I am going to take this image into illustration so that I can create curves to put into Rhino.
When I was working with the curves in Rhino, I struggled to create hatches inside of my thick lines. I think the mistake I made was drawing this piece in Photoshop instead of Illustrator, since it may have been easier if I had drawn AND traced in Illustrator. I decided to just engrave this piece as hairline outlines. I have changed my medium to Prisma colors
Completed with Prisma Colors
