Hi from France !
A year ago we have bought a Shapeoko 4 for different projects. But I got in my mind an old dream : to cut in wood a « copy » of the famous « Great Wave » (or Kanagawa Wave), designed by Katsushika Hokusai.
This masterpiece is one, the most famous one, of his 36 views of the Mount Fuji. It is based on woodblock printing, fashionable in the Japanese XIX century. This style had a very strong influence on the Impressionism in France and elsewhere.
The first step was to analyze the different levels from the background to the foreground of the artwork. In my view, they are eight of them : the background (the sky with cloud and the two signature), the mount Fujy itself, and several waves with the 3 boats in the tempest. A good photo was vectorized and all the vectors of each level were regrouped and optimized. An export in svg format latter, I got the toolpaths from Carbide Create ( good simple software ! ).
I used colored woods, produced in Portugal by Inveswood. It is an hydrophobic medium density fiberboard.
In order to get the fine details with the needed contrast for the waves, I painted a white coat on the blue Valchromat. Then it is removed where necessary with a 1/32’ bit. The brown fiberboard for the background was darkened with ink, then erased where necessary with a 1/4 ‘ bit. The two traditional signatures were just carved with a 1/32’ bit, then tainted with ink.
The background (30 ‘ x 20 ‘) is also the main structure. Each other part is cut with 1/8’ strait bits. All parts are assembled together with a usual glue for wood.
This post is mainly to thanks the community for all the valuable information we got from to learn how to use properly this great machine (sorry for my bad English).
[Marco Miniussi] (https://marco-miniussi.fr/)
