First couple of carves

[HerbO]

Here are the first few projects .... testing it out.
Grandson and Sign for some friends. My wife decided to play and try to colorize the carve. Trying to decide if it looks better natural.

[fozziebo]

very impressed with the paint job on the photo carving....i have been wondering what one of these carvings would look like in the hands of a skilled painter!!!! Very subtle technique required to maintain the "carved look" and not make it look like just a painting on flat wood!!!! Bravo!!!! Now tell me how you did it!!!!! Any adjustments done to the photo? Also, what type of paint (i'm guessing acrylic) and any tips for your technique?

thanks and great job

[HerbO]

I think I need a little more work for it to look great.
I took the photo in Photo Impact which you could use any of the graphics programs and converted it to grayscale. Then made the background black. Touched up any area to darker gray that I wanted to be deeper carved. My wife just dry brushed the different colors in acrylic. The piece looks a little better than the picture. I would like to find a program that would do a better conversion to grayscale .... similar to the grayscale shown in the scanner pics in the Gallery. Anybody find anything close??

[CallNeg151]

I think I need a little more work for it to look great.
I took the photo in Photo Impact which you could use any of the graphics programs and converted it to grayscale. Then made the background black. Touched up any area to darker gray that I wanted to be deeper carved. My wife just dry brushed the different colors in acrylic. The piece looks a little better than the picture. I would like to find a program that would do a better conversion to grayscale .... similar to the grayscale shown in the scanner pics in the Gallery. Anybody find anything close??

No. This idea has been going on for quite a while. The problem is that photographs use light and dark to create a two dimensional illusion of depth, while carving actually has depth (and is using light and dark to actually represent the depth, not merely simulate it to our eyes).

The thing that keeps me envious of our those with higher-end CNC router systems when it comes to photos is PhotoVCarve:
http://www.vectric.com/WebSite/Vectr.../pvc_index.htm
Which does not support Carvewright. It converts a photo into a series of grooves of varying thicknesses which are then carved out by varying the depth of a v-bit vector carving.