I chose a vector drawing of Van Gogh’s Starry Night for my CNC project. I downloaded the vector file from the noun project site, then removed the words at the bottom in Adobe Illustrator. Then I uploaded the file into Inventables’ Easel workspace and adjusted the heights of each part of the image to create different shadows in the cutout. I carved two pieces with a roughing and detail pass for each.

I stained the first piece with Pickled Oak liquid stain, which achieved a finish I really liked that brought out the grain of the wood well. When doing the same for the second piece, I realized my brush must have been contaminated with some darker stain, as the second attempt turned out much lighter. To correct this, I mixed in darker stain until it appeared near to the tone of the first piece.

After staining I cut the pieces on the Carvey. Finally, I sanded the inner and outer edges of the pieces to remove wood slivers and shavings. Below is a picture of the result.

Cost breakdown:

Materials

Wood: Based on wood panel info from MacBeath Hardware online furniture store, these squares could be found for about $1 apiece. I used 3, so $3.

Stain:

I used very little stain, so say $.50

Time: 2 hrs @15/hr

Total: $33.50