Caotan Pham: Laser Engrave

Super Smash Brothers is a Nintendo fighting game that brings in many different characters from many different series to duke it out. It is the game that my friends and I play together the most, and the game that represents our friendship the best. Therefore, I picked the logo to be engraved into wood.
The symbol replacing the "o" in "bros." is the symbol representing the fighting game, which I have reproduced.

The entire thing was drawn in Illustrator. The symbol itself was the easiest, simply creating a circle and subtracting two lines creates the shape. The fire was harder, but it was based from a larger circle, with shapes that were pulled from it, and modified to look like a fireball. The Smash Bros. symbol was then placed on top. The wisps of flame were also simple drawn paths. To add more detail, an outline was traced around the outside of the main fireball. Partial outlines were also drawn on the wisps, resized, and subtracted, to give a lighter feel to them. The levels of black were adjusted for raster depth, and exported into .eps format for the off campus shop I went to.

This is the final product. It was cut into 2.77mm hardwood plywood, which was cheaper than expected, and still relatively soft. It turned out pretty well, and smells like campfire. In hindsight, I should have cut the background into more of a plaque shape, but that is for future consideration.

Here is a closeup of the product. Here you can see the various details of how it was cut. If you look closely, you can see that the laser does not have a steady beam dragging across the board, but instead, it shoots thousands of concentrated beams, with varying strength, to give different depths.