Family Portrait Pyrography on Acacia
Making family portrait pyrography is just about the same process regardless of the wood type or species used, today, we’ll use laminated Acacia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmlWzilmDlM/
Laminated boards have several advantages over live edge alternatives, the biggest is that it’s a lot stronger and as a result, far more resistant to warping as there isn’t the general distribution of densities that most woods have going from the core to the outer bark.
Laminated boards are also available far wider than most live edge alternatives, more importantly, width doesn’t go into extreme pricing as it would if this was one solid board, whether it was softwood or hardwood.
Although you may wonder why I keep showing many projects of this type using Acacia, it just happens that I had a lot of it in the shop left over from other jobs and it’s a very cost effective hardwood laminate to work from so what is engraved at CNCROi.com on it, will stay that way for a very long time.
The focus of laser engraving this family portrait pyrography is to get as much cost-effective depth while also achieving a good level of contrast, as no inks or dyes will be employed during the production process at CNCROi.com.
I have a special place in my heart for Pine, it’s just so easy to work with in a variety of ways, lasers love Pine!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poleEGELcPY/
With most photographs, it’s a very fine line between having too much and not enough detail, it’s still very much a learning process with each and every job I do here at CNCROi.com that employs family portrait pyrography but I’m definitely getting better at it job after job going from digital to physical products.
For this photograph, there was very little in the background so that worked very much in the favor of this pyrographic process, additionally, there was high contrast available within the photo itself, this just helps accentuate the details even more.
Probably the most detailed pyrography I’ve done to date, this was actually done using grayscale, meaning you can feel the subtle bumps in the finished piece rather than the sharp drop-off experienced with the family portraits I’ve done at CNCROi.com.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGJGFMFwDmU/
The laser is working line by line, detail by detail, and looking at the sped-up video of this process, it’s pretty fascinating to see how evenly the wood is being vaporized as the process goes from one end of this Acacia to the other during the family portrait pyrography process.
Of course, there is lots of smoke produced during this process at CNCROi.com but it smells wonderful until I begin to seal it with tung oil later in the production of this family portrait pyrography.
Weddings, funerals and literally everything in between work great for pyrography, CNCROi.com has been doing this type of work for years and it’s always an amazing process to behold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzgVW9zpZOw/
The bright light is the result of the laser engraving process, it isn’t the laser itself, which is invisible.
For this project, I did two passes onto the Acacia, the first is to create a bit of contrast but more importantly, break the surface to create some depth, the surface is always harder than the inside of the wood.
The second pass is where the charcoal is really generated, that’s all that is used for the contrast, there isn’t anything else involved with this type of work which makes it both food safe and cool!
There are several ways to create contrast on wood, CNCROi.com uses them all from paint to inlays, but the laser is the only machine that’s capable of both carving out details and creating charcoal at the same time in one step.
This is Simon before he was born, the resolution of the image wasn’t the best but it’s a great reminder to him of how far he’s come through the year and a half of life he’s enjoyed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1fCqFYVkTk/
Looking at a close-up of the engraving process on this family portrait pyrography project, you can see that the engraving process is produced by micro-explosions and vaporization into the surface of the Acacia, it isn’t like a torch where you have indiscriminate burning, things are happening literally at nano-meter increments.
This is why, in the picture below, you don’t see one huge stretch of flames but increase, micro busts of energy reacting to the laser vaporizing into the wood, and it isn’t even the color of fire, but a bright light with smoke following the head of the laser.
Now that the family portrait pyrography is finished, as far as the laser is concerned, it’s time to go over it with a sander to remove all the smoke that has deposited on the upper surface of the Acacia.
It’s quite a contrast removing all the settled debris, the beauty of the wood has started to come-out and you can see how sharp all the details are on this family portrait pyrography.
Of course, family pets can also be commemorated in pyrography as well, any type of imagery in fact, including any mix of fonts and styles you wish!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRqwIhDbFjY/
Cutting off the top corners and removing a distracting large area of who knows what at the bottom that wasn’t evident in the digital version of this project come together to nicely complete the project.
Tung oil makes a huge difference, it makes the wood a lot warmer and seals it as well, this won’t be used to eat off of, so just one solid thick coating is more than fine for this family portrait pyrography on all sides, front and back.
The finished work looks fabulous, there’s a reason why you don’t see to much of this, the time it takes to produce and work involved both before and after the laser is tremendous in order to achieve these types of results.
Take a look at the family portrait pyrography from another angle, photographs tend to auto-correct things a bit too much, so the video helps show a lot of detail that gets filtered out by the camera.
If you are looking for custom family portrait pyrography, contact CNCROi.com right now!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfqtPZITAWU/