My SO and I noticed some Christmas ornaments in a store made from three layers of plywood which had been cut out on a laser cutter and stacked together to form a sort of foreground, subject, and background inside a wooden ring. It was a simple design but it was cute, and we figured we could make our own versions using the laser cutter at our local makerspace.

My SO made some cute designs including a Christmas pig with a little Christmas house. I decided to make an ornament for my webcomic President Deer Adventures (about a stolen Secret Service prototype and the endangered deer it thinks is the president) because the outer portion of the presidential seal is also a circle and could take the place of that wooden ring.

I came up with a simple three-layer design:

Foreground:

Middle:

Background:

My files are actually pretty crude, I have two files for each layer, a vector of the outline for cutting and a raster of the image for etching. I run the raster first, then the vector to cut it out. I meant to combine them at some point but the one (unexpected) bonus of doing this in two steps is that once the etching is done, I can cover it in painter's tape to protect it from getting darkened when the laser cuts around it. So I ended up doing it this way the whole time.

My first prototype wasn't bad:

But I wanted a little more definition, better detail, and some more Christmas-ey colors. I experimented awhile back with layering paint on plywood and then using the laser cutter to burn through upper layers to expose the colors below. I wanted to try something similar with this.

I stained the wood with a dark green stain, spray painted it white, and tried the same design.

The color didn't show through, so I thinned some of my old acrylic paints, covered the etched section and wiped it off again. The white spray paint wiped clean easily, and the etched material soaked up the color.

The colors are subtle, but I think they fit the wintry look.

After I had the first painted version all cleaned up and put together I made some more for President Deer's earliest loyalists, the folks who helped edit the short story, and who read some of the early comics, back before I was putting them online.

Some of the old plywood and wood paneling I was using was thicker than the laser cutter liked so covering the etched material to prevent scorching was important.

The laser didn't always cut all the way through so I had to clean up some of the pieces by hand. Once they were glued together (I used superglue) I painted the edges black and touched up any scorched spots with white paint.

Hail_to_the_chief.wav

If you want to make your own you can find the files here: https://mega.nz/folder/vBtl2apA#dK61J3XNr1k41EA-sf56nw (I must have converted the outline vectors from these images at the makerspace because I can't find a copy of them now, sorry!)