Halloween is coming!

I have a favorite artist when it comes to Halloween related art. His name is Chad Savage and he has a website called Sinister Visions. http://www.sinistervisions.com/
He offers some free Halloween/Horror fonts he has created, and shows off some of the art pieces that have he's created over the last several years.  He gets lots of freelance work.

Anyway, he has some artwork I've really enjoyed.  Some of it appears to be a watercolor/paint mix. I'm absolutely awful with watercolor work, so seeing his work is inspiring.  I love the mix of bright color with earth tones and greys and shadow.

I thought it would be nice during the rainy days we've had here for the last week, to do some carving and painting.  Each Halloween I try to make at least one new decoration.  I picked an image from Chad that I like, and modified it and converted it to carve on the Shopbot.  I should point out that I don't sell things like this...it's Chad's art, and I don't believe in using another person's art for monetary gain without their approval or consent.  This is for my house, and I've already shared it with him.  Chad has another (much smaller) piece I did from his art on his site under "Artistic Interpretation" which pretty well sums it up.  If this were a sample piece for my shop, I'd have created my own art.

Anyway, I recently picked up a fairly large amount of pink insulation foam so that I could really stretch my legs on the Shopbot and experiment at a large scale.  I put on a 4' x 3' piece and let it carve.  I'm still learning what I can do in terms of pushing the bot to the highest speed and still keep quality.  While foam is forgiving and can be cut quickly, there are nuances to figure out.

Once the piece was done (about 11 hours) I primed the foam and then began to paint.  If any of you cnc folks think that time amount is high, please give me a shout with suggestions.  The piece is 4' x 3' and about 1/2" in depth of carve maximum.  I used a 3/16" ballnose bit.

I used the airbrush to build up several layers of paint, and then finished with some hand painting.  Considering the scale of the piece, it went quickly.  I painted it up in about 2 hours, using some air flow to speed up drying of the acylics. For a 4' x 3' piece, I thought the time frame wasn't bad.