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Laughing Mantis Studio

Art inspired by biology, created by a biologist

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You can see my frequently-updated works-in-progress by following @laughingmantisstudio

laughingmantisstudio

Daniel D. Brown, Ph.D. | Breast Cancer Research Scientist
Woodworker/Artist
Husband to @tamarynart.
AKA: @danieldbrownphd
Pittsburgh, PA.
Step 6: Cutting! (Sorry: this post is late due to Step 6: Cutting! (Sorry: this post is late due to vet emergencies and work 😩). When it comes to scrollsawing, 99% of it is just practicing and getting a feel for the different blades and speeds. I have a few tips that may be helpful (for a true beginner anyway). I don’t consider myself an expert, but I would say I’m now fairly experienced. 1. Change your blades often! Scrollsaw blades don’t typically last very long, unless you’re cutting very thin or soft wood (and of course it varies by brand/blade type). Many dense exotics will literally burn through your blades in no time. If you notice burning/smoking, drifting, or extra force needed, just stop and change blades. They’re cheap. 2. Always let the blade do the work. You should never have to push very hard to get a nice cut (except on some crazy dense woods. This bloodwood was like rock). And ALWAYS avoid any side pressure. This will result in unsquare cuts. If you’re make stencils, signs, or sectional cuts, this may not matter. But for interlocking intarsia pieces, a square cut is critical. Unsquare cuts will leave either gaps or pieces that won’t fit without throwing the whole thing off. 3. Adjust your saw speed if that’s an option. I’m always playing with my speed to give the cut I want. I don’t really have any good rules or tips on this. I often just cut full speed. But that’s sometimes too fast for delicate or complex cuts and some woods. I just adjust until it “feels right”. 4. For exceptionally tiny pieces, I cut part way through, quickly slap some shipping tape around both sides, and finish the cut from the other direction. This keeps it immobile and also prevents it from flying away. You wouldn’t believe how many pieces I’ve lost in the last millimeter. 5. Cut into a thin piece of plywood or any flat wood onto the table to make a quick zero-clearance surface to further support and prevent small pieces being lost. 6. Make your internal cuts first, unless you have a specific structural reason to cut the outline first. That’s everything I could think of off the top of my head. Feel free to let me know if I missed anything or if you have your own tips! *** #scrollsawart #woodintarsia @harveyguillen
Step 5: Choose your weapons! You’re gonna need a Step 5: Choose your weapons! You’re gonna need a sharp blade and something to move it up and down. I spent ~4 years using a @portercable and it served me well. But I’m pretty happy to have upgraded to my @dewalttough for the quick blade change feature. But it doesn’t really matter what saw you use. You can create cool stuff with any saw. Some particularly amazing artists just use a handheld fretsaw (swipe for Nini’s fret saw she’s used since she was 17! @arboree.gallery). I recommend buying a $20 “deadman” footswitch. When cutting high-precision, it is incredibly helpful to be able to just lift your foot to stop the blade so you can reposition your hands or the piece. Some people also make zero-clearance inserts for cutting tiny pieces. I just slap a piece of plywood on the table (pictured), which is much faster. Next up: blades. I bet if you were to ask 6 scrollsawyers their favorite blades, you’d get 6 different answers. My current favorites: OnLine titanium reverse skip tooth blades from Judy Gale Roberts (intarsia.com). She’s the most famous intarsia artist I know of (google her Apollo piece for NASA), and she’s picked some good blades to sell. My second fave are Flying Dutchman. I’ve used brands from the big box stores and personally found them to be more expensive and lower quality. But there are many good blade brands out there. Comment your favorites; I always like trying out new blades. As far as size/style of blade to use: this is very species and project dependent. I find #3 and #5 blades to be good for 99% of what I do. I’ll go up to #7 or 9 for very thick or dense wood. I always choose blades with some variation of reverse teeth. These extra teeth (on the bottom or sometimes interspersed) make the backside of the cut clean and reduces sanding. I absolutely hate spiral blades, though that’s probably due to my lack of skill in using them. And I don’t like the extra kerf width. My advice for beginners: buy a selection of blade types and sizes and play with them to see what you like. Scrollsaw blades are cheap (~a few $s for a dozen). Pick some favorites and stock up. I go through a LOT of blades. *** #scrollsawart #woodintarsia
Step 4: Applying the template This is a short step Step 4: Applying the template This is a short step, but it bears mentioning because it comes up in my private chats with beginners all the time. How do you stick your template to the wood?? I have a tried and true method to which I rigorously stick because it works for me. As with my whole process, there may be better or smarter ways than mine and I’d love to hear from any deviations from other artists/woodworkers out there. My method: @3m Scotch Heavy Duty shipping tape (which I buy in bulk) goes on the wood and Super 77 spray adhesive sticks the paper to the tape. For me this combo has the optimum balance of firmly holding to the wood during cutting while also peeling off easily without removing wood fibers OR leaving any glue residue. Some tapes don’t stick as well and lift when scrolling (not acceptable). Some can cause tear out when peeling. And some leave sticky residues (you do NOT want to directly adhere template to wood with this spray. It sticks too firmly. You can peel it with heat, but it will be messy). I’ve seen people who use contact paper. I can’t comment on that as I haven’t tried it. I’ve spent a few years now operating under the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality. There may be better methods, but mine works. One other tip: a pair of forceps or tweezers come in VERY handy in manipulating tiny sticky pieces of paper (and the wood itself). PS check out my gross glue-covered cardboard at the end of the vid. *** #scrollsawart #woodintarsia
Step 3: Choosing & milling wood After cutting all Step 3: Choosing & milling wood After cutting all the template pieces comes one of several incredibly tedious but fun parts of my process*: digging through piles of wood, picking the species for each piece, making sure I can get the pieces I need from the stock I have, and resawing and planing so that my stock for each layer is at least roughly the same thickness**. Seriously, I probable spend an hour or two just staring at the wood. I do a lot of resawing for intarsia (cutting thick boards along the grain to make thinner boards). I generally shoot for ~1/4”-1/2” thickness, but this of course is design-dependent. I spent a year saving for a bandsaw to allow me to do this, and it’s probably the tool I use most frequently. It’s massively increased my capabilities; my stock often comes from local urban trees I’ve reclaimed and milled. I can resaw 14” with my trusty @rikon_powertools 10-324 with a @lagunatools resawking blade. I love my saw. Followed by a few passes through my @dewalttough planer. Note: I’ll be mentioning the specific tools I use throughout this series. None of this is sponsored. Choosing colors is difficult because every species reacts to finish, time, and UV exposure differently. Not only may the pieces look different with finish, but will often darken (cherry), lighten (walnut), or turn brown (padauk, redheart, bloodwood) with age. For most of my work, this is just part of the art, which I accept. If you want colorfastness, dying is a safer bet. You can slap 100 coats of UV protectant, but that’s only gonna slow down the process. I’ve amassed over 3 dozen species of wood over the past 4 years. Most of it just small pieces, some scavenged, some purchased. It’s crazy that only a few years ago I had only some pine and poplar from a big box store. I hoard every tiny scrap after each project, saving the piece in a bun of labeled ziplocks. For complex pieces like this one with too many pieces to visualize in my head, I will take pictures of my stock species (after a water spritz) and mock it up in Illustrator (with “clipping masks”). This is usually just to get a very rough idea of contrast and how species look together. *** #scrollsawart
Step 2: Cut the templates. Okay this is a boring s Step 2: Cut the templates. Okay this is a boring step. But there are a couple important points here. Also, if you want to be able to control both the grain direction and natural wood color of each piece individually, it has to be done. I save all my templates into PDF format and print them out that way - primarily because Acrobat has a handy and reliable feature for printing things “poster-size”. So if you set up your document/artboard size larger than a standard 8.5x11” letter, you can print sections and tape them together. Taping is a pain (& can introduce error), so as mentioned before I try to break my templates up to fit the elements on single sheets when possible. Another very important point I’ve found when printing: if your printer has a “fast print” option, turn that shit off in the properties/settings! Fast printing (at least on my printer) results in slightly inaccurate prints. So when you have to use multiple copies, the resulting pieces don’t match up precisely. Print accuracy is paramount. I cut out each individual piece, leaving 1/16” to 1/8” on the outside of the main cut lines. As for this piece, I’m gonna be cutting some stupidly small pieces and it’ll be funny if this whole series fails because I just can’t cut that small. 😂 ... #scrollsawart #woodintarsia
I’ve had many people ask me about aspects of my I’ve had many people ask me about aspects of my process for creating wood intarsia art. So I thought I’d use this new piece to create a more comprehensive series to which I can quickly point people in the future. This piece will be a tribute to Guillermo (@harveyguillen), the hilarious character from “What We Do in the Shadows”. I’ll speak more on the art and design itself later. Please ask questions if you have any so I can add details! Step 1: Design something! I sometimes start with a hand-drawn sketch, but often use photo references - often a mashup of photos. For example, this piece is based on promo art for the show. But I added some elements, such as the medieval crossbow, which I placed onto a photo of Daryl’s hand from the “Walking Dead” (better angle). I primarily use “Adobe Illustrator” for my templates, though I’ve also used the free “Inkscape” when I didn’t have an Adobe license. Vector softwares like these are superior for templating because the templates are scaleable for any print size. Importantly for scrollsawing, you can adjust your line thickness to the width of your blades, which for me is around 0.25-0.5pt in Illustrator. The primary tool I use is the “pen tool”, which creates “paths” with fully adjustable curves and points. I quickly make my basic shapes as in the video, then go back and tweak the individual points until I’m happy. I also add in a quick straight line on each segment to indicate the desired grain flow direction for that piece. This becomes important when I have a hundred pieces of paper cutouts with no obvious orientations. Sometimes I’ll pre-label the pieces according to color. But this is tedious and I usually pick colors/wood species once I’m in the shop (though I do some color mockups too). For single layer artworks (where all the wood will be in one plane), I just print out several copies (usually 5-6) and move on to the next step. However, for pieces with multiple layers of depth like this one, I copy different elements onto different “artboards”, to be able to print those elements out separately, with each layer planned out to properly support the next layer. ... #scrollsawart #woodintarsia
Bandit (AKA Bandaman, Bandito, Bdog, Bandy, Sweet Bandit (AKA Bandaman, Bandito, Bdog, Bandy, Sweet Pea). I’ve been wanting to make a wooden Bandit ever since I started creating intarsias. But as some of you know, Bandy hasn’t been doing so great lately. In fact, while making this, he began coughing a lot and was subsequently diagnosed with congestive heart failure (So far the meds seem to be working, though they will exacerbate his kidney disease). He’s almost 14 and already has chronic kidney disease, 1 blind eye and 1 deaf ear. But he’s had a pretty sweet life and almost zero health problems until the last couple years. @tamarynart got him as a gift from her ex when she was 19!! And I’ve now been his daddy for half that time. And he’s been the absolute best fur-son I could ever have hoped for. He pretty much has to be cuddling one of us at all times, and I’ve never met a friendlier dog. Made from sycamore and crab apple. This is the second time I‘ve actually stained one of these pieces. But I wanted the colors to be pretty close to correct. I used @chestnutproducts Spirit Stains. Oh, and just to preempt: I’m not particularly interested in doing pet portrait commissions. Unless you’re like super rich, then maaaybe. 😂 But @ingrainedmoments_woodcraft makes amazing pet portraits a step or 10 above mine! ... #petportrait #scrollsawart #woodintarsia #madeinpittsburgh #pittsburghwoodworking
Super quick morning project: I decided @tamarynart Super quick morning project: I decided @tamarynart needed a stand for her new Kala ukulele. Whipped it out in a couple hours (+ finishing time). I woke up, quickly made a template in illustrator (based on a few images I saw online - this was the simplest and sleekest), resawed in half the first piece of scrap walnut I saw that was large enough, planed them, stuck them back together with double sided tape, bandsawed it out, ran it through the oscillating sander, and slapped a couple coats of poly on it. The 85 degree weather made for quick finishing. She’s already got a ton of songs under her belt! ... #ukelelestand #kalaukulele #woodworking #madeinpittsburgh #pittsburghwoodworking
All three wooden Darth Mauls in the friendly trash All three wooden Darth Mauls in the friendly trash-talking woodworking competition with Luke (@cyclocrosscutter) and Justin (@scrollsawscribbler) are now *complete! See previous posts for details, but TL;DR: Luke said “I’m gonna make Darth Maul”, I said “I’ll make one better”, and Justin said “hey, I wanna play with you guys”. You can vote for your favorite here or in their posts (Justin’s tomorrow). Or better yet, just trash whichever two you like least**. Votes are meaningless and will only be used to say “haha I got more votes than you, loser.” In all seriousness, both Justin and Luke are amazing woodworkers and artists. We all have our own styles. We just share a love for geekdom. And wood. And keeping each other’s egos in check. Seriously, our DMs are brutal. All three of us cut our pieces with scrollsaws and used only natural wood colors (no paints or stains). Luke also tried to bling his up with some aluminum. Justin put his flash in another crazy frame (you should see some of his other recent ones). I went the whole “oh yeah well my frame is hand-carved” route. cc: @switwer1 *Luke’s isn’t really done - he still has a crucial addition left for his, but he left it out for now out of “fairness”. ** Most of my followers know that I keep my feed almost exclusively positive and full of animals, rainbows, unicorns, and love. I make an exception for these two ass-hats. ... #scrollsawart #woodintarsia #woodart #geekart #starwars #starwarsfanart #clonewars #darthmaul
Shaping of “Bandit” pretty much done. Next com Shaping of “Bandit” pretty much done. Next comes lots of sanding and then my anxious attempt to capture his colors with spirit stains. All pieces cut from the same sycamore branch I scavenged from the park nearby, which also became the previous blue jay piece. ... #scrollsawart #woodintarsia #petportrait #madeinpittsburgh #pittsburghartist
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