Not long after we purchased our first CNC router Dan was browsing through his old collection of National Geographic magazines looking for inspiration. He came across a picture of a fish skeleton which had been fossilized. The picture inspired an idea.

He scanned the picture into his computer, opened it in Photoshop and set about making the image suitable for use as a texture bitmap. He made it a black and white image, then adjusted the tonal balance, cleaned it up a bit and added a few missing details.

He then created a second black and white texture bitmap image in Photoshop using a large speckled brush. He called it ”Spilled Coke”.

Next, Dan created the vector files for the panel shape and lettering which would form the border. All of this was imported into EnRoute. He created the reliefs forming the medallion shape and then he layered the texture bitmaps onto the surface one at a time. It only took a couple clicks of the mouse to make the magic happen. Finally, he tool-pathed the file and sent it out to the CNC router.

In less than an hour, the panel was routed from a piece of 30 lbs. Precision Board High Density Urethane (HDU). He whipped on a coat of acrylic paint and put it under a large fan to dry while he mixed up some glaze. The panel had dried sufficiently by the time he was done mixing and he slopped on a quick coat of glaze and quickly wiped it off with a shop towel.

The “Spilled Coke” texture bitmap is available as part of our Texture Magic: Classic Collection of texture bitmaps.