ENGRAVING WITH COLOR😜HOW TO COLOR FILL YOUR ENGRAVING LIKE A BOSS🐱‍👤

welcome to another episode of laser engraving 9-1-1 my name is michael today we're going to go ahead and cover how to back fill engravings i've been using this method for a long time it's a foolproof method super easy and it's actually really fun allows you to add vivid colors natural colors to all your engravings and the end result is just absolutely fantabulous so we are going to go through the whole process from beginning to end on how to prepare the art how to get it lined up how to engrave it how to color fill it and then how to seal it and deliver it to the customer so if that sounds like something you're into then stick around because i'm about to blow your mind all right so first things first we've got to prepare our graphics for engraving so what i have here is i'm using adobe illustrator and i've got my laser engraving 911 logo and i've got this youtube logo that i've turned into a vector here and i cover that on a other video on how to convert graphics into vectors and we've got this shape over here that i've drawn that's 11 by 5 which is the size of our cedar board that we're going to be engraving and then color filling so the reason i'm showing you how i lay this out is because you may be doing this for a customer and you want to show them a mock-up or a proof of what you're going to be doing or how it's going to look or how it's going to be color built so first on let's just let's just dive right into it i'm going to put two logos on this piece of wood and it's really just for the purposes of showing you the process of color filling your engravings so let's go ahead and grab our laser engraving 911 logo here and we're going to set it on the left side and then let's go ahead and grab our youtube logo and put it on the right side i just figured you know why not color fill two logos instead of one so if you want to align these uh with each other vertically um you can select one hold down shift select the other and then use your alignment tools which are up here and use the vertical align center tool so those align themselves there and then if you want to align them on your board here you can select both of the logos right so just click click click hold down shift while you click them all hit ctrl g and group them so now they're they're grouped and you want to select your group and the shape together by holding down shift and then you can hit the horizontal alignment tool and then the vertical tool and you'll see that now they are centered and nice and even in this board and that is the file that i'm going to use so now to create the mock-up showing what we're going to do here is i'm going to select everything hold down alt and while i'm holding down alt i'm going to drag a copy right below it right there and then i'm going to let go of my mouse and let go of all and i've made a copy now this back part here the shape the 11x5 i'm going to color fill that with maybe like a brown color because the cedar is kind of a brown and i'm just going to come over here to my color swatch palette and just color the back part and on these logos i'm going to fill them appropriately the way we're going to paint them so i'm going to ungroup these logos and i know i'm going to ungroup so i'm selecting the logo object ungroup and i know that my 911 with the laser beam is one section and then i know laser engraving with the gear and the tools is the other section so let's go ahead and select the top part and i'm just going to come over here to my color palette and select white and then i'm going to select the 911 part and i'm going to come over and select red because we're going to paint it in red for the youtube i'm going to ungroup this and i'm going to leave the top black because we're going to paint that in black and then for the play button i'm going to go ahead and we're going to paint it in red so at this point we've we've colored in what we're aiming to do by the end of this video and we've got a nice presentation for our customer they can see what the file actually looks like and then what we're going to be doing for them by the time we're done finishing their sign so with that we will move on to the next step all right so check this out we got this 11 by 5 piece of cedar wood i like cedar wood it's really easy to engrave it actually engraves kind of dark on its own but since i have a lot of stock of this we're just going to be using this as an example so the first part you want to do before throw this in the engraver is we want to mask it okay so there's different masking tapes different uh there's white masking tape there's the green frog stuff i really like using this scotch blue tape i use it on all kinds of applications here in the shop and i feel like this adheres the strongest to wood as long as the surface is clean doesn't have any little dust or anything like that and this is what i use when i'm doing color fill engraving first step we're going to do is we're just going to cover this whole sheet with masking tape so let's go ahead and do that so i think and you want to cover every piece of the surface you don't want to have nothing exposed so i just tear these off at the end we'll get all detailed here in a second and then when i put the next layer on i don't do it over here i want to have it just overlap just enough to cover the last seam there so i do my next strip there right i'll tear that off and then this this is only going to take three three pieces of tape right here and then i'll do that one now tear that off so now we've got this on here and you want to use something like a hard card these are used in like still screen printing and you'd probably just use a credit card if you have an old costco card or something but you want to definitely go and get this nice and adhered on there because you don't want any of this lifting off during the painting process so obviously you've probably already figured out that the laser is just going to go right through this stuff so we're gonna go ahead and go ahead and get it on there really good i love this blue tape it really sticks and it sticks for a long time you could actually mask this off like we're doing right now and then leave it in the shop for days and it won't start to lift off i found that other masking tapes they will lift off over time with humidity and heat and stuff like that but this stuff really sticks on there and if you don't want to fold it over you can just cut off the edges but the whole idea is to mask the whole surface that we're going to be working on right there and maybe just give it a couple more get it nice and smooth on there and then that's it we're just going to leave it masked off just like that and now we're going to go on to the next step okay now we're over at coreldraw which is hooked up to my laser we're back in the shop and we're going to import our graphic so this is coreldraw and when i open a new file by default it is the exact size of my laser bed 32 by 20 which is an epilogue m2 fusion so the first thing i do when i'm setting up a rectangle or a square piece here is i drag over here in the corner if you can see my mouse i drag and i snap to the corner here to create my zero zero point right here now i know that my piece is 11 by five that piece of wood that we masked so i'm going to go ahead and use my little ruler tools and i'm going to come over here to this ruler on the left and i'm going to drag it out to uh close to 11 but then i'm going to go up here on the x and i'm just going to type in 11 .00 okay and then i'm going to drag down to approximately 5 inches and on the y i'm going to put negative 5.00 and that will give me my area where i will be working now i'm going to go ahead and bring in the file that we created which is called master setup file and we actually made an outline so one of the cool things with corel is you can um if you want to snap it like right to the corner of your laser bed there's a cool trick you can do so what you want to do is you want to go to view snap to guidelines and what you can do is you can bring another ruler down and it snaps right there to the edge and you can bring another ruler to the edge here now when i bring this over okay hold on let me grab it all when i bring this all over it snaps right to that point right there now if i didn't turn that snap to guideline on it wouldn't snap in there so now i know i'm right in the section that i want to be working for this project so i don't need the outline so i'm gonna go ahead and highlight the outline and delete it and now i'm going to send this engraving file over to the laser which is where i'm going to go and place my wood now so i'm going to go to print preferences advanced i have a wood setting that i like to use called wood general and in the epilogue job manager you can save all your favorite settings and i go back to general check that it's a speed of 90 power 60 400 dpi i do want to go kind of deep because we need to make sure that we get through that tape and into the wood as well well past the tape and i might even go twice i might even run this job twice since i'm paint filling it so that's something to keep in mind i don't want it on center and grave which is right here so i'm going to uncheck that and i'm just raster engraving so and i'm not using any vector cutting my piece size is 32 by 20. so i have that set here that's got to match your laser bed and at this point i'm ready to send it over so i'm just going to click oh and this is important so you can engrave from the top down or the bottom up i like to engrave from the bottom up so it kind of pushes the smoke towards the exhaust ports so i'm going to go ahead and switch that to bottom up and start engraving from the bottom of the piece and work towards the top where the exhaust ports are and i think that's about it so i'm going to click ok it says no issues i'm going to print once and then i'm just going to print and it's going to send it over to my epilogue m2 fusion i am using 120 watt laser so my settings may not be the best settings for your laser if you have a 30 or 40 or 60 watt or something like that you may have to slow your speeds down but let's go ahead and go over to the laser bed and put this piece in there i'll show you how i do that okay so now we're over with the laser and we've got our piece of wood that we masked off and you know i wanted to talk about this ruler this is like a machinist ruler and i keep this on hand because it's in decimals and i like to work in decimals some people like to work in millimeters and stuff like that but i prefer decimals and this is a great ruler it's a little tiny steel ruler it really allows me to get accurate with my part sizes so like i know i designed this around 11 by 5 because that's the general size of it but if you get out your ruler and you really kind of you know get down to it with this ruler i can clearly see that this is actually more like 10.95 inches long by uh 4.95 it's not quite 11 by 5. but for the purposes of this video you know we're just working in general terms because really we want to show you the process of color filling the engraving so this is a great tool to have if you're in the laser engraving business i keep a few of them around and they really help me with getting accurate measurements on parts so let's go ahead and set that down and we're going to go ahead and corner this up here in our corner because that's the area we're working in and then we're going to go ahead and bring our laser in focus this is all epilogue specific instructions you may have a different laser which is fine in a different focusing stick or way that you focus but i go ahead and put that that focus tool on there go down to focus and then bring my focus up and i just bring it up until it touches the surface there you go so now we're pretty much set up we've already uh sent that file over to the engraver as you can see it's right here it's gonna take six minutes and 45 seconds and i'm going to go ahead and close up the laser here get a better shot of it actually being engraved and mute the sound while we watch this get engraved [Music] so [Music] let's go ahead and take a closer look at this now that we've finished it i actually ended up doing two passes so um you can see with this there's no lifting of any of the masking tape you can see that we got a nice deep engraving so the paint will flow in there and we can fill all those engravings up with paint and overall man i'm really happy with the way it came out i think it's time we throw some color on there what do you think let's go ahead and see how this looks so some supplies here is you want to get a variety of you know not too expensive paint brushes you know a lot of those packs that you can get and i'll link some descriptions below just want a variety so something small so you can get into the tiny stuff something big bigger so you can kind of fill in this area and it's just good to have a variety of brushes here maybe a paper towel to wipe off your brush if you need to now the paints that i'm going to be using is this really cool acrylic set that came with a whole mess of colors and i got this one because it also came with kind of some some neon colors as well but also some standard light blues and stuff like that i'll link a description i'll put a link in the description for this stuff but as you saw in our proof we're only going to be using red black and white today so that's what we're going to be doing and i am kind of just going to start with the white and uh of course you know with all paints give it a good shake and we're going to fill all this in with white here and this is the this is where the magic of the the mask comes in you don't have to worry about screwing up the surface of the board you're working on because the whole thing is masked off and it's masked off really really well so we can kind of go crazy with the paint um you know if you're doing white it's always good to think you might need a couple of layers um you know maybe you will maybe you won't but let's just go ahead and start putting it on the reason i like to use acrylic paint is because it doesn't wick into the fibers of the wood you would think you know oh i could just you know really quickly and you know spray this whole engraving with dark brown spray paint and get that nice dark brown and gray look that everybody wants but the the thing is with that is spray paints have a tendency to go into the engraving and then wick into the fibers of the wood so you don't get like a clear paint filled stop where the paint is and then it starts to bleed out so acrylic paints don't do that they're they don't have oils in them and stuff that likes to wick into the fibers of the wood so that's why when i'm doing paint filling of engraving i use acrylic paints and you know there may be other thicker acrylics that you like but this is a good affordable you know acrylic set that i think works really well so let's go ahead and just get into it and there's really no um you know there's really no place you could start and i love doing this because you really can't screw up it's like it's almost like paint by numbers you just go ahead and you start filling in all the areas that you engraved and if you slop a little bit over that's totally fine you just want to make sure that you fill in all the little nooks and crannies right so this cedarwood has a lot of like little ridges and things in it so you want to kind of uh go back and forth and kind of reevaluate you know what you filled maybe you didn't kind of look you know look at it from like different angles kind of maybe look at it from this way you know see if you missed any spots but i'm not being too uh too careful here because i know that the mask is my friend it's my friend the mask is your friend as long as you put it on right you won't have any issues when you peel the mask off well that's not true there's a couple more tips we got to go over um but i think you're already kind of getting the idea all right let's move on to the red parts and pull this red out not my favorite red in the world but for this project you know it'll be good this brush this uh brush size that i picked is working out to be kind of universally awesome which is cool okay moving on to the black open that away from my from my white why did i pick white for this tutorial i don't know but definitely want to watch out for paint splatters on the white because if you get that in there you're just going to have to paint over it again it can be a pain in the butt all right so getting some black on there nice healthy amount i'm not sure if this is a gloss or a matte black but let's go ahead and just start caking it in there oh yeah okay they're just getting it in there no no problem there i feel like that painting with bob guy walking me through this i that's very therapeutic i have to say everything going on in the world sometimes it's nice to just sit down and throw some paint down and relax so let's talk about drying so what we don't want to do is let this dry for 24 hours because what we don't want is the paint to stick to the mask so when we're peeling off the mask it starts peeling the paint or pulling the paint out of the engraving so i like to let my back filled engravings dry for about a half hour only and i usually put them in you've seen me in other videos dry things in the exhaust chamber in the in the laser bed with the exhaust fan on only to help kind of speed up the process so i give it about 30 minutes of drying time we're going to peel all the masking off and see what we have created those are the tools all right i just pulled it out of the laser bed and you can see here that it's not completely dry it's pretty dry but it's not like a hundred percent dry not like overnight dry and like i said the reason we want to pull this out prior to it being because we don't want the paint the mask to pull out the paint or you know basically make it hard for the to detach from the edges right here of all the engravings so this part can be tedious depending on how much how detailed your engraving art is so if there's all kinds of little nooks and crannies um you're going to be doing this for a while but this shouldn't take too long and i'll probably speed this up a little bit so at this point if you wanted to you could take more paint and you could do another layer because we got the first layer pretty much dry or you could just pull the mask off like it is now for the purposes of this video just so we can get the proof of concept i'm going to go ahead and start taking the mask off now we're getting there so um at this point you gotta go through and you're gonna grab the edges of whatever you couldn't get like the o whatever you couldn't get in the first grab i'm just gonna go through having a good weeding tool is key for this use like little dental tools sometimes you might find that if you try from a different direction it comes up easier and you're gonna get little little sticky things all over the place there [Music] what do you think i think that's exactly what we set out to do i think that came out great nope oh see see what i mean there's always something so double check make sure you got all the little parts especially in the white parts so one of the things that i like to do is when the paint's a little bit dryer you can see that we had a little bit of that might actually just be [Music] just a little bit of bleed well if you have a little underbleed that got underneath the mask one of the things you can do is you just get yourself a since we went nice and deep but remember we can you can get yourself a random orbital sander and see me use this in other videos and you can just take this outside and once it's nice and dry and you can just give it a you know give it a run over and it'll take care of any little tiny little paint that escaped right here right here you know all these little spots right here you can just give it a little once over and it's not going to hurt the engraving as long as you're not digging into there because remember you're just you know you're just working on the surface let me just give it a little zip zap you want to wait until the paint's a little dryer so the sawdust doesn't uh adhere to your uh to the any any wet paint that's in there so that's one of the things to think about um but for the most part i think that's all we need to do to this and then put a clear coat on it so i'm going to take it outside real quick hit it with a little just really light not not too crazy and just kind of smooth off the edges and then blow it off with some compressed air and we'll see how it looks after that i love it when a project comes together so the final step is this isn't really rated for outdoor ceiling so but i do it does add kind of a nice glossy finish to it i definitely wouldn't put this sign out in the rain or anything after i coated this there is other products for that possibly epoxy coating other things that are more suited to completely seal the wood from the elements this is more of a decorative finish just kind of give it a nice shine and kind of brighten everything up so i like to use this for signs that i know are going to be inside or depending on the application but this is great for for these kind of applications i highly recommend this product and i'm going to show you how i apply it give it a good shake always with paints and clear coat and i just go back forth back back you really don't need much because you don't want to have any drippy drips so uh if you want to do multiple layers you want to kind of wait a little bit but what this does is it really kind of brightens up the uh the colors the acrylic it seals the surface you can do a little bit on this on the sides if you want kind of hit the edges it'll look kind of uniform from any angle ladies and gentlemen that's it i think i'm going to let this dry and then give you one last little kind of photo finish look and that is how you laser engrave and color fill your laser engraving as easy as that all right let's see how this turned out oh man that came out great if you guys can see how awesome that came out it really came out nice i'll show some close-up pictures as well so you can really see all the nice detail and that little bit of sanding took care of any little tiny little bleed that got under the mask and it just it's really crisp and clear now i hope that you enjoyed this video on back filling your engraving paint filling your engraving however you want to word it and learn how easy the process is it's really fun kind of relaxing at times at least the painting part and i sure had fun making the video and i hope you enjoyed it too before we take off i want to thank my subscribers and thank all the people that are interacting and leaving comments on the videos it means a lot to me and tells me that you're watching and if you could if you haven't subscribed yet please go ahead and hit that subscribe button like share if you're going to buy any of these materials for doing this project i've listed every single tool and every single material that i've used in this video in the description below using those links really helps me out their amazon affiliate links they help put some money towards my projects they help me get motivated to keep making more videos and it's a great way during these hard times to earn a little bit of extra money on the side in addition to my full-time job so if you could use those links when buying your materials for laser engraving really helped me out a lot and we'll see you on the next video on laser engraving [Music] you

Channel: Laser Engraving 911

Views: 178,836

Keywords: how to laser engrave, laser engraving, laser engraving tutorial, fiber laser engraving, Co2 laser engraving tutorial, fiber laser how to, tips for laserengraving, laser engraving wood, glass laser engraving, how to jig for laser engraving, laser engraving art work, laser engraving business, tip and trick for engraving, fix laser engraving, make money laser engraving

Id: ea-exuB32ZI

Length: 31min 54sec (1914 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021