Pokémon Wall Art Discs
I have recently started learning out to use a router with some wood work that I am doing and really have enjoyed drawing things on wood and using the router to carve out the designs. We had some family coming in from Texas for Spring Break and I have two little cousins that are 6 & 4 years old, they LOVE Pokémon and I thought this would be a fun exercise to put my skills to the test and create something cool for these guys to take back with them. I started out by getting SVG files of Charizard & Pikachu and pulling them into Adobe Illustrator and sizing them for the wood discs that I picked for this project. I then used the Pokémon font to write their names off to the side so that it would be a bit more personalized. From there I mounted the discs in the garage and used my projector to project the designs on the boards and stenciled out with a pencil to keep everything accurate. Once the designs were on the wood I went back over with sharpie marker to make sure the lines were clearly visible for when I started cutting into the wood.
Once the designs were cut I needed to figure out how I wanted these to be finished. I wanted the wood grain to show through the color and not just use paint. I had some different dyes on hand so I used some scrap to test the colors to refer back to, this approach worked out perfectly. From there I burned, sanded and prepped the pieces for finishing. I used resin dye on the shapes of the Pokémon and used a darker stain for the outer portions of the discs. I had to use some white acrylic paint when finishing on some of the areas reflecting white, the dye just didn’t cut it, but aside from that you were able to see the wood grain throughout the pieces.
The kids loved them and I felt accomplished in what I was able to cut by hand, especially being new to using the router.
