A colleague gave me an idea late last year of cutting simplified/cartoon-ized photos. The gist was to stain, burn, or paint a light wood, then machine out the light parts. I liked the idea and gave it a whirl. Fast forward some months and I’ve now made 8 of these so far and really like them!
I thought I’d share the ones I’ve made to-date. The most recent was my first attempt in aluminum, and made a nice birthday present for my wife. I’m torn on whether or not the machining marks are too distracting… but at the end of the day, I felt it is super unique and nicely conveys that it was made by me.
Good question. Indeed. For all the pictures, I muck around with them in gimp (open source Photoshop) to get them into pure black and white. Sometimes this works globally (one threshold for the whole image), other times I end up processing sections separately to get the look I want.
Ultimately, I take my pure black and white image, convert to svg with Inkscape, and insert into a sketch in Fusion360. I use an extruded cut (selecting all white areas) to make my model and generate the tool path (in all these cases, two subsequent 3d pocket operations: 0.125in followed by 1mm).
