I have been engraving leather patches for hats. What I do now is take a logo and design it in Adobe Illustrator. Then I copy/paste the logo into LightBurn and make all of my layers. Currently, I fill everything and then use lines to go back and make the letters and logo pop out more.
I started with masking tape to reduce the soot and burn marks on the leather. The first one I did was the fish one shown. That one had higher % settings and masking tape. I found that the tape is extremely time consuming though and that the leather can get damaged from picking off the tiny pieces in my more intricate designs.
The GD logo and the Lodge Grass logo shown were done without tape and at a 20% fill engraving, 325 mm/s speed. The lines inside the logo were 15% at 350 mm/s speed I believe. This was the highest I could go before charring the leather really badly.
Also, I used veg tanned leather and then dye the leather after it has been engraved.
How can I get dark engravings like the leather patches you see on Etsy and other sites, without masking tape? If I removed the lines and just raster the image, with that allow me to go darker and reduce charring?
Just to reiterate, I’ve seen people do this without masking tape and achieve basically black images all the way through their logo without charring at all. Not sure how.
