Jan 28, 2010: Leaf Carving

Clodfobble found these carved leaves from China.
Carving is easy, just cut away everything that doesn't look like what you want, right?
Not so fast whittler, in leaf carving you're not allowed to cut the fine spiderweb of veins, that support the leaf.



That's pretty amazing.
It would be easy with a computer controlled laser, IF all leaves were the same, but I think they're like snowflakes.
Unfortunately there's not a lot of info at the link, like who does this and why?
So it's up to you google enhanced readers to fill in the blanks. ;)

Wow, those are cool...but I have nothing more interesting to add...so I'll just leaf now.

A thousand worms chewing on leaves for a thousand years.

How much extra for colour?

They are produced like an old camera film would be, using high intensity light to burn the image onto the leaf............

I found that info in my imagination, so dont rely on it :P

They're beautiful, but some people have WAY too much time on their hands.

xoxoxoBruce;630482 wrote:

It would be easy with a computer controlled laser, IF all leaves were the same, but I think they're like snowflakes.

I don't think so, Bruce. It looks like only the upper left on is cut through. The rest look like the lighter areas are thinner but not cut through. Could a laser do that?

Amazing stuff.

I disagree, I think it's cut.



The exporter's site, is a typical Chinese to English translation that makes it a little difficult to understand the exact process.

The process of carving is performed by artists using tools to carefully the surface without cutting or removing the veins.

I'm guessing scraped.

Happy Monkey;630569 wrote:

I'm guessing scraped.

That's what I was thinking, HM.

I'm thinking an acid resist is photo applied, then the un protected areas are washed out with some sort of solvent. Alternatively, you could do a similar resist with a chemical that you know a certain type of insect would avoid, make your image with that and let the bugs go to work. Like how they clean delicate bones of flesh.

It could be scraped if the Chinar leaf only has coloration on the surface, or to a very shallow depth, and the center flesh in transparent.

Happy Monkey;630569 wrote:

I'm guessing scraped.

Are you a gynocologist?


:D

xoxoxoBruce;630580 wrote:

It could be scraped if the Chinar leaf only has coloration on the surface, or to a very shallow depth, and the center flesh in transparent.

My first approach to duplicating this would be to soak a dry leaf for a while, then very slowly scrape away the flesh. The veins stick out on the underside of the leaf, so they would remain.

Pressing it into a putty of some sort before scraping might help protect the veins as well.

From a boy's experimentation book (from memory):

"To create a leaf with the veins only remaining, take a dry leaf and tap away at it with the bristles of a brush."

So, I conclude, using a stencil in combination with this technique would give you a picture similar to the above.

Perhaps its a laser that is set just hot enough to either dry out & then remove or burn away enough of the leaf without damaging the veins.

They're not leaving just the big veins that stick out on the back, though. They leave the whole spider web of tiny veins in between them, too. If you blow up the pictures from the website, you get all kinds of artifacts but the tiny veins are still visible. I think the scraping, with the color only being in the scraped off surfaces, sounds the most plausible.

Huh what? A desktop Excimer laser and some software is somehow not a tool?