but not very scary looking ... yet.
The next step is to hand contour the piece to rough it
up so it looks aged and weathered. There are many tools
and methods you could use here, and you could spend a
lot of time adding detail. Remember how impatient I am,
though? I grabbed a die grinder with a rasp bit and a
sanding wheel. I also used a hand rasp, and then
smoothed out certain parts of the tombstone with some
DAP fast drying latex caulk (Figure 7). Watch out for that
die grinder — you can remove too much material in a
hurry if you are not careful.
Finishing Touches
So far, so good, but have you ever seen a pink
tombstone? Me neither. So, let’s change its color!
I love modern spray paint technology. There are many
fast-drying exotic finishes available — your options are
limitless. You can get a fantastic finish with little time and
effort. A fleck stone spray paint finish was very tempting
here, but since most spray paints will dissolve foam, I
decided to use latex. I chose a satin gray as my base coat,
and then used gray, black, and burnt umber mixes to
weather and shade the tombstone (Figure 8).
Save Time, Save Money
You can spend a little time or a lot of time here. These
tombstones are typically viewed
under low light conditions, so I was
looking mostly for contrast and
depth, and that didn’t require a lot
of time. Here is a breakdown of the
time invested in this project:
• Research: 3 hours
• Design time: 1 hour
• CNC routing: 30 minutes
• Hand contouring: 10 minutes
• Painting: 30 minutes
So, my total time was 5: 10.
FIGURE 8.
Painting
suppliesand
brushes.
FIGURE 7.
Die grinder,
hand file, sand disc, and caulk.
FIGURE 9. Finished
tombstonedecoration.
84 September 2014
Probotix Comet CNC Router
www.probotix.com
Royalty Free and Public Domain bitmap and
vector clipart libraries
www.openclipart.org
www.pdclipart.org
www.clker.com
Files for this project
www.probotix.com/downloads
LinuxCNC
www.linuxcnc.org
Vectric Vcarve Pro
www.vectric.com
Free Fonts
www.dafont.com
Halloween Fonts
www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=803
How to draw a creepy tombstone
www.fuelyourillustration.com/draw-a-creepy-tombstone-using-adobe-illustrator/
Some definitions sourced from WikiPedia
and other online resources R
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