Thank you for your much appreciated compliments, I feel I do need to clarify a couple details or feel I am misrepresenting myself to everyone here. I am an artist, yes, but much of the artwork on these boxes came from elsewhere, mainly clipart.com (my workplace has a subscription and I take full advantage of it). I do have to redraw many of these designs & rework them (or they would be a blurry mess) using Corel Draw, which is actually not an easy to do. Working on the Wizard of Oz designs took a couple days and getting the fish design for the Leng box probably took the most time of all. But I love doing it because I learn new things all the time and am getting better at it.
The art is finding the right wood for the designs, because some of it has so much character that it can over power the artwork, so the trick is finding ways to make the art work and wood grain compliment each other without losing the quality of either. Plus the grains in wood have different densities, so the wood will burn darker in places than in others... that makes it even trickier when you have something that has a lot of fine details in grayscale. It may look fantastic on the screen and end up lost in the actual engraving process.
I am working on creating more line art of my own to use in the future, but to be honest, I don't have the time I used to, to draw & paint, and end up spending more time re-creating older work, looking through my sketchbooks and designing new things that I can do with wood and a laser. So that is why I welcome you to "customize" with designs of your own or ones you have found. Sometimes the original artist can be very generous and has no problem giving permission, but it does need to be given.
You are all my inspiration... there are so many creative people here and it makes me want to make something... my decks needed something and since I had wood and was too lazy to dig out my sewing machine or rummage through boxes of cloth...
