For this homework, we were tased with creating a wood engraved piece using the Carvey cnc machine. To perform the medium difficulty homework, we had to both include two different depths in the design and cut out the design itself. Since I tried to make the midterm inspired by my sister Anja, I decided to make this homework inspired by my sister Lyris. Given this inspiration, I immediately knew exactly what I wanted to make: a design of Megamind, Lyris’s favorite movie and character (other than perhaps Edward Scissorhands, who seemed too difficult to carve since he is human; the cartoon mega mind seemed more reasonable). Thingiverse did not have a picture of Megamind since he is trademarked, so I googled around and managed to find an SVG of the man himself:

I adjusted it in illustrator until I had a single color outline and started to fool around with it in Easel, the free online Carvey software. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do as my second depth at first, but as thought about it I decided to engrave one of Megamind’s quotes: “Evil…well, it’s just cooler!”:

Content with my design, I cut some plywood, but was warned that plywood and the carvey don’t mix well, so I cut new pieces of particle board at a size of 11.75×8 inches, as Easel showed me that Megamind needed to be relatively large to be as detailed as he deserved:

I decided to stain the wood before hand so that Megamind would stand out as light brown against a blue background. I did this with indigo express color:

From here, I decided to do a quick test round with carvey before sacrificing my beautiful blue pieces of wood. I made a quick sketch of two stars in carvey, and chose the technique of cutting out the outline halfway on one side, then flipping it over so the other half would be cut out.

While the front half of this test cut worked fine, when I flipped it over and tried to cut the other half of the square, the wood started to pull out and get stuck, so I realized that this was not the best possible way to cut something out in carvey. Here you can see the inconsistencies on the edges due to this poor cutting technique:

I tried again, this time cutting a circle all the way through in one go. This worked, mainly because easel has a built in function where it doesn’t cut all the way through. This keeps the wood stable:

Happy with this, I moved on to cutting in my real wood. Unfortunately, there were some issues with my first attempt. The first one was that Megamind’s face was much t0o detailed and close together, resulting in chunks of his eyes flying out:

The smallest bit I could find was 1/32:

And while I was optimistic that it would work in the future, the design was too small as it was to cut very successfully. I also noticed that there was no need for the Megamind graphic to be so deep, especially since every extra layer exacerbated my issues with chunks of the graphic coming out. Thus I lowered the depth for subsequent cuts. From here, I spent a long time in illustrator and in easel trying to get the face right. Since my first piece of blue wood was messed up anyway, I used the back of it to try out many different faces before I finally found one that was satisfactory:

After inserting my most successful face into the original design, I chose to change the outside edge of the cutout to be a rectangle instead of a circle:

 

I felt that first of all, the square made the overall piece look more like a movie poster, and secondly Lyris could use it as a cork board for notes, etc, more easily in this shape. I liked the idea of my Megamind cut, while obviously still being a work of art, having a function for Lyris. It was for this reason also that I didn’t choose to switch to lumber, which likely wouldn’t have been so finicky around the details of Megamind’s face and potentially could have saved me a lot of time. Given what I had learned about how shallow the carvings really needed to be, I changed the face to 1/32 inch depth and the writing to 1/20 inch. I also chose to cut the back of the design with the writing first, and then the front with the face and the outline, as it was more important to be that Megamind be in the center where he belonged than for the writing on the back to be centered. Due to the very shallow cuts, it only took about 20 minutes to cut each side, and I quickly was able to bang out two versions. I also found that it was very easy to take the cuts out of the wood , they popped out without needing any tools:

Overall, this is one of my favorite pieces I have created for this class. A few times throughout the process I wished momentarily I had chosen easier wood or an easier design, but one look at his smug grin and I knew I was doing the right thing. The project, of course, is priceless, but if you wanted to put a price on it, here is the breakdown for my carvey Megamind:

Particle board: 8.50$, buyrack.com

Express color stain: 10$, amazon

My time: 60$ (~6 hours at 10$/hour)

Tools and shop: 50$ (txrx makerspace lab in Houston)

Total: 128.50$