Engraved Blue Epoxy Fern on Oak
This piece is for sale, and is available at the Redwood Monkey Workshop — Fern Engraved Wood Wall Art in Blue Epoxy.
This is a unique image that I made and engraved on the piece of wood with my Tormach CNC machine.
It started out by me grabbing several ferns from around my property and taking some photos of them with white paper in the background. I discovered that the shadows were less apparent if I held it away from the paper, as opposed to just sitting it on the paper and taking a photo.
I opened them up Illustrator and converted the raster images into vector files using Image Trace. I did a YouTube video on this a while ago (search my YT page to find it), and I had several ones I ended up playing around with:
After that, I exported it as a DXF (they work better in Fusion 360) and edited the tool paths in Fusion. I could then mill it out, which took about an hour and one tool change halfway through:
From then on, it is the normal process: Fill with epoxy:
…plane, sand, and a few more epoxy coats to give it the final gloss effect.