Oh yes, I’ve been meaning to post this here for a while. A few people have been past while I’ve been laser cutting this and I keep promising to upload pictures, so…
This is in plywood, with the colours (including the white) etched to a depth of about a mm on the laser cutter, then I’ve painted it in acrylic. I couldn’t take a photo of the finished item that really shows the depth, but here’s one from when it was just out of the cutter:
My flow for creating the picture itself (minus several dead ends) was: I found a picture I liked from a Google search, printed it out and and traced the lines. Then I scanned it into the computer as a bitmap. imported it into Inkscape, used the pen tool to trace the line approximately, and the path tool to tidy up the lines. A thick line’s no use to the laser cutter, so the next step was to fill the line with the bucket tool, followed by more tidying up with the path tool. That left me with the inverse of what I needed to engrave, so I drew a rectangle around the drawing and used one of the Boolean tools (I forget which one) to end up with the areas I actually wanted to engrave.
Two things I’ve learnt that will be useful in future are: 1) If you use Inkscape’s Trace Bitmap to trace a drawing, there’s so much tidying up that it’s quicker just to use the pen tool to trace it manually. (I wasted a whole day learning that.) 2) Some of the coloured areas are far too small, and if I’d widened them in the design they would have been far easier to paint.