Question regarding Logo shading

[Houndie dog]

I am trying to do my first real project. I have a logo for a company and put it in corel in grayscale and then imported it into the designer program. It looks pretty good but the wings don't stand out and you can't see them when carved. I am sure this has something to do with tracing or grayscale or something like that. I would appreciate any help you experienced (and I mean that in a good way LOL) carvers could give. I also can't figure out how to make the carving above the workpiece (the opposite of relief).
Thanks all.
Grant

[pkunk]

I thought this looked rather good just as you did it. What other look are you after?

[Houndie dog]

Thanks Pkunk, I am just trying to figure this out with out wasting to much wood. I will give it a shot for real.
Could you anser another question Pkunk ?
What wood do you find works best for signage ? I have tried oak but it splinters and MDF is too fuzzy.
Thanks Grant

[pkunk]

Maple(soft or hard), ash(pronounced grain though) poplar, white oak & even sugar pine. For durability outside -white oak. For ease of cleaning up a carving-nice straight grain bigleaf maple.

[Houndie dog]

Thanks for the help pkunk..... I actually have some very nice kiln dried fiddleback maple from Washington. I have made a few jewelry boxes with it and thought it would make a beautiful nameplate/sign for my wifes office door. I just have to make some test runs cause that wood ain't cheap $$$$$$.

[Jon Jantz]

Hi Houndie Dog...

I took your logo, cleaned it up, added a little dimension to it and beveled the letters, and added a cut path to cut it out... Sometimes a few little things like that can add a little effect to your carving...

I've attached a couple of pics and the .mpc file if you want to play with it..

Happy Carving!!

[pkunk]

That is so much nicer than just the plain one! You have talent, I only have experience on the machine.

[DustMe]

Hi Houndie Dog...

I took your logo, cleaned it up, added a little dimension to it and beveled the letters, and added a cut path to cut it out... Sometimes a few little things like that can add a little effect to your carving...

I've attached a couple of pics and the .mpc file if you want to play with it..

Happy Carving!!

That looks great Jon! What program did you use to create your GIF file?

[Jon Jantz]

DustMe,

I took his image into CorelDraw, then used CorelTrace to trace the image to get a vector file. From there I cleaned up the Phoenix, eliminated all the bars underneath (they were kinda deformed because of the quality.) I also eliminated the text and re-typed it so I could start out with nice crisp letters.

I added the bars back in underneath by making one and then copying it over... used Distribute to space them perfectly. Then I used the Fillet command to round the edges of the bars...

At this point I had a nice crisp, clean image. I added the gradients to the objects and bevelled the letters by using the contour feature... export to a .gif with a transparent background, (eliminates the Feather Box around the image in Designer..) and that's about it...

Took about 10-12 minutes total...

[DustMe]

Thanks for the info and quick response Jon. I appreciate it!

Which version of CorelDraw are you using?

Steve