"Pirate Cave" sign...
One of my nephews currently has a 5 yr old son and a 3 yr old daughter. They're expecting a second daughter any day now so the son has been moved into the smaller bedroom his sister used to have (so the two girls can share the larger bedroom he used to have).
5 years old seems kind of young to experience your first "downsizing". To ease the transition, his new room is being outfitted in pirate themed everything…
I put together a simple sign to top off the new decorating scheme. The outline's shape is "Panel 66" from the clip art included with Aspire' v4.0. The crossbones are also part of Aspire's clip art…they're part of "Skull X-Bones (components)".
The skull came from the same file as the crossbones but had to be modified to add the eye patch. That file doesn't include the original vectors and I'd only just started learning Aspire when I tackled this project. So, figuring out how to add the eye patch took more time than I expected. Fortunately, a technique shown during the Vectric User Group Meeting a couple months ago pointed me in the right direction.
With both eye sockets empty, the skull seemed a bit intimidating for a youngster. Adding the eye patch makes it look more like a pirate skull and less like a warning of poisonous content…
It's the first sign I've carved…came out much better than I feared it might. I carved the design in clear pine using a 1/8" ball nose bit, painted the background color, then painted the skull, bones, and eye patch. I gave it a couple good coats of dewaxed shellac, then used Dr. Crumleys Snake Oil Mask technique which helped simplify painting the freshly carved text. I had a few places where the masking didn't completely cover but with the shellac protecting the background paint, it was trivial to wipe off excess red paint while the paint was still wet. Another coat of shellac was sprayed on after the lettering was dry.
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