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This layered sea turtle art project is 10" X 8". There are four layers of 1/4" thick Baltic birch plywood. I have done a few layered patterns and I always enjoy the way they look. They are also fun to cut. I hope you enjoy them also.
A friend of mine(Doug Green) has a YouTube channel where he does CorelDraw tutorials. I use CorelDraw for all my pattern design so I follow Doug and we share ideas about the program. Doug primarily focuses his tutorials on the laser cutter community but that is so similar to the scroll saw that it is a good resource.
Doug recently did a layers sea turtle pattern as a tutorial and shared his files. He did a great job but I did not want to copy his patterns so I started from scratch last night and designed this four-layer scene. I did steal the concept but the pattern was drawn by me. Doug actually took the idea from another artist so the beat goes on.
A word of caution. A few of the interior cuts are small. I made sure that a 1/16" drill bit would fit in all the interior cuts but some of them are close. I used a micro drill bit in my scrollers drill. If you have a set of micro bits they will come in handy here.
The total cut time for the project was about 2 hours and 45 minutes. Once you get the top layer cut the rest goes very fast. The top layer has just over 100 interior cuts. The top layer took 90% of the cut time. I used a Pegas #3 modified geometry blade. Any #3 scroll reverse blade will work fine. Just remember that plywood dulls blades quickly. I only used one blade for the entire cut but it was really dull by the time I finished.
If you would like to make the pattern larger and easier to cut then remember that you can use the "poster print" function in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC to print the patter at any scale. If you do not use Adobe Acrobat Reader DC as your default PDF viewer then you may not have this option.
The image below shows the top layer of the pattern being printed at 150% using the "Poster Print" function from the print dialog.
