I’ve been trying to do a carving of a playing card. It’s been a growth journey.

My first attempt using just black and white to set carved depth worked but didn’t produce an easy viewable outcome. This set me into seeing if I can do a better 3D design.

I decided to try  creating a multi tiered design with various heights to simulate a 3D  so that the king looks as though standing in front of the rear surface/wall.

I targeted making 3 levels. 1: the large diamond inverted so that it stands high rather than sunken, 2: the surround about the large diamond and the king’s hand lower, 3: the kings face lower than the hair.

In doing so the approach was I converted the image into a paths layer. From the paths layer I used the tools to select particular paths eg a diamond, With that I created a new paths layer from the paths and filled the closed paths with a flat fillet with Shapes from Paths which made a new raster layer.

I  set the z layer height with additive blending. With the diamond surrounds I also did a path selection and fillet. I used it then with a subtractive blend to take away/lower the surface. Similarly to the king’s face but with it not as low. 

Getting the z heights right was fiddly. I need better discipline with that.

Unfortunately I did miss raising the cuffs on the sleeve. That was black and sunken. I should have set it higher above the hands. Maybe I will fix that if I cut this again.

I’m sure there are many techniques yet for me to use to simplify.  One  of course is to select multiple similar areas to create as one in a new raster layer.

I’m happy with the outcome as it’s heaps better layered except now that I’ve cut it I see that viewing a wood carving with so much detail is hard. There might needs to be right. The only contrast that the eye has is shadows.

I wonder if anyone has hints on how to finish such a carving?

Russ

Hi Russ,

It's definitely tricky trying to invert specific areas. I went ahead and attempted to re-create what you did here and just the design of the card itself doesn't lend itself well to only inverting the diamonds and the area behind them. It definitely requires some fudging stuff around to get those sleeves up!

Personally, I like to V-carve most things with the medial-axis carving operation, maybe even just a shallow cut and fill the rest of the inner areas with the profile milling operation and a Cut Width that reaches the center of large areas with a tiny stepover - or come in with a small flat endmill to clear an area flat.

With the unmodified card image, here's the medial-axis carving operation with a 90deg V-bit down to 0.05" deep:

...and then follow up with a Profile Milling operation with the same V-bit, and a contour Offset of 0.05" to match how far from the edges that the V-carve cut reached in its deepest cuts for a 90deg bit angle, and a 0.015" cut stepover, which could be smaller if I wanted to make the ridges less apparent:

Trying to replicate what you did, with the inverted diamond area, and then I created a Parallel Carving operation with a 0.5mm tapered ballnose, it looks more like the result you ended up with:

I think that it's just not a good strategy to carve something like this as a relief!

Trying again, but using the previous strategy:

It took a little bit of a Smooth factor on the modified raster-layer, and raising the Contour Z on the m-axis carving and profiling operations so they could get good contours, but I think the result speaks for itself! Granted, you won't have varying heights for things, like a relief, but any time there are fine lines it's very difficult to get them to come out nice with something like a parallel carving operation.

Hope this helps! :]

 - Charlie

The type of wood you choose will be very important to get the fine details to avoid the tearing out of the grain. Looks good Charlie. 

Thanks  Charlie....

I've never explored those tools. A lot of options there to go through, I've never needed them . The card got me curious. 

Thanks Joe