Brittany Han: Skateboard Extra Credit

 Inspiration:

        I wanted to do something with a cool design for the skateboard. My mind immediately whet to traditional Koi Fish Tattoos. I have always thought they looked awesome and I think having a koi fish shredding down a half pipe would look sick.

    

Modeling:

        I started modeling by making the initial curve of the skateboard. I then closed this curve and extruded it out into the needed width. I boolean differenced of the corners to make the deck look more like the moderne style board decks. I found a cool koi design online and added some water to the edges to get the effect I wanted.

Render:

    Knowing that the skateboard would be wood I moved my model into Keyshot. I used the fine grain wood texture on the board part if the model. For the engraved part I left it a plastic black so its easily seen on the render model.

Taylor Volquardsen : Week 11 : Laser Engraving

Vurro's Boogie

Tiny Plants

Background Influence

Concept:
My design was heavily influenced by the video in the link above. The video combined with lots and lots of plants pretty much sums up my aesthetic, so I wanted that to come through in my engraving. Just the skull with the plants on the board felt empty though, so I added a graphic art background to help fill in the space behind them.

Design in Adobe Illustrator

After Engraving

Techniques:
I wanted a slightly jagged feel, so I hand traced all of my pieces in my design using a heavy stroke with the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator. It's composed entirely of straight lines, even when it looks curved. When I got it back from the machine shop on campus, I used a medium-sized brush to fill in the large engraved parts of the board with wood stain, then used a much smaller detail brush and a towel to fill in the smaller lines of the design. I used the towel to brush away any stain that got outside of the grooves and clean the board. After the stain dried, I added a coat of clear gloss polyurethane to seal everything.

Stained Engraving

Materials:
8.5 in Moose blank skateboard deck
Varathane Kona wood stain
Minwax clear gloss polyurethane

Corrina Spurlin: Week 11 Skateboard Engraving

Illustrator Design

Engraved Board

Close-Up of Engraving

Attempt with graphite

Concept
The concept for my skateboard design largely played off of the visuals that came from my 3D Printed Model. I wanted to continue the rose-like theme, while upholding a rigid and geometric aspect to it as well. I wanted to contrast from my 3D model, however, in that the design would appear generally intricate and compact, instead of simple and open. 

Technique
The main techniques utilized in this assignment were the line tool and pathfinder in Illustrator. I also used the rotate tool to create the radial flower designs that sit between the diamonds. Pathfinder was used to crop an inverted version of that design so that it could appear again, just in a different form. 

The file was setup to match the board as closely and accurately as I believed possible, but when it came time to engrave, problems arose and the engraving ended up being off-centered on both axes. 

Materials
The materials used within this project were the skateboard deck, and use of the program Adobe Illustrator. 

The material of the board created an issue for me when it came time to actually engrave, as it had an outer non-wood protective layer that caused the engraving to look different than I would have preferred. The laser had to do more work to get through to the wood, so when it did it was weaker and didn't appear dark. I plan to engrave my design again in the future with a board that either does not have a protective layer, or one that will be easy to sand down off the wood. That way the final product will look much darker (and as close to black as possible without any of the design).

It was recommended to me that graphite or charcoal could be used to fill in the design to make it appear darker, so I tried to mark graphite onto one of the small diamonds to test this theory. As it can be seen in the final picture in the series, this caused the raised layer to look darkened, after wiping off excess, instead of the engraved level. 

EDIT:
I attempted to re-engrave my design with a slightly different material wood that I additionally sanded prior to the laser engraving. The result was far better than my first attempt.