 Are you looking for an easy laser craft that you can sell? We'll show you how you can make it right now. What is up? A welcome back. Do you like to do a build or make it? So do we. And we have new videos each week. We're always looking for easy laser projects that we can make and sell. And when Kim showed me these names with the shapes inside, I was like, those are easy and those look hot. I kept seeing these all over Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, and I thought they would be a really great project for us to make with our laser and show you how to make them. Step one, we're going to gather all of our supplies. We needed two sheets of 14 by 25 inch, quarter inch MDF. We're going to use our Foxy Hughes paints. And we're going to use some Starbond thick. This is the thick stuff, so it'll hold. And you can find all of these on our website at kngmakeit.com. If you're looking for easily cuttable MDF, we have the boards and all desktop laser sizes on our website. Step two, we're going to make our design. You can do this in X tool creative space or light burn, but I want this to be quick and easy. And I am most comfortable in Adobe Illustrator. So I'll meet you there. We're going to start by using our type tool over here on the left. And we're just going to type out our name, Grace. I'm going to go back over and get my selection tool. I'm going to grab a corner and hold shift and drag it out to make it big. I grab another corner, hold shift. Now I want to change this font to something fat. I like Milligram macro. I want this name to be 20 inches wide. And it's still not fat enough. So I'm going to add a stroke to this. I'm actually going to add like a 15 point stroke to this. Looks good. Now let's make this type an object. And we'll do that by going to our quick actions and clicking create outlines. Next, I'll go to my objects menu path. And then we'll outline stroke. I want to merge all of this, but I don't want to merge them all together. It'll become one big word. So I'm going to ungroup them first. Now let's select just one letter. We'll go to windows menu. Then we'll go down our path finder. And we're going to use our unite tool. This will make it all one object. And we'll just do this for each letter. And it's merging that outlined stroke to the actual letter. Now we have fat objects. We're going to duplicate all of layer one. And then we're going to select all of layer one by clicking the little bubble. We're going to get rid of the fill so it's none. And then we're going to add a stroke to this. Now I want to add like a 20 point stroke to this because I want a nice fat frame. But I only want it on the inside. So I'm going to put my stroke only on the inside. We're going to outline this stroke to make our frame. So we're going to go to objects menu path outline stroke. Some of my frame pieces are some of the letter frames overlap each other. So I'm just going to erase parts of each of these letters that overlap. So I'm just going to erase part of this C. And you'll notice that I'm only erasing part of the C because it only erases what's selected. So I can select like the A by holding control. You can hold control and select the A. Now I'm just going to delete the parts that overlap the R without even touching the R. I'm going to do the same thing on this side. Let's get rid of the C. Now let's go get our selection tool. Everything's looking nice. We'll select that entire layer. Now I'm going to unite this entire layer using my Pathfinder tool. I will do the same thing for the bottom layer. We'll unite it using my Pathfinder tool. Let's unhide layer one copy. Now I have my base and my frame. We're going to make a new layer. Let's make this thing a little bit prettier. We'll make our base layer a light shade of pink. And then we'll make this frame a dark shade of pink. Start making it look a little more like what would be in Grace's room. I already collected some clip art. So I'm just going to grab that from my other tab. We're going to paste this into our new layer too. Just going to size this and get it in place. Let's make a duplicate of layer one copy. That way we keep our frame. Because I'm about to merge it with layer three. So let's drag that above layer three. Now we're going to grab layer three and layer one copy. We're going to use our Pathfinder tool and unite these two layers. Now they're all layer three. It's all one piece. If I hide that top layer you can see. But now we see we have some stragglers outside the lines. So we're going to get rid of those. I'm going to draw a box around the whole thing. Let's make this box white. So it's a little easier to see when we go to make our trim. Now I'm going to select this layer one. I'm going to copy. I'm going to select layer three and do control shift v. That'll paste in place. With Grace selected I'm going to hold shift and select the box also. Then I'm going to use my Pathfinder tool and I'm going to use minus front. With that still selected I'm going to hold my shift key. Select the black frame piece with the clip art in it. And now I'm going to select the Pathfinder tool minus front. This should clip out all of the little pieces and stragglers outside of the letters. I'm going to finish this up and make this a cut file and fast forward. But if you like this Adobe Illustrator for laser crafts, join us over on Patreon where we do a monthly Illustrator class over Zoom. And we have a Discord channel with tons of information. Our cuts. We're going to bring that quarter inch MDF over to the X-Tool P2 and cut out our design. We'll meet you over in creative space. So we'll show you all of our settings and how we set up our file. Here we are in X-Tool creative space. We've already loaded our board. Our camera has refreshed. We're going to set our material type six millimeter MDF. Now we're going to set our focus. We're going to just drag this over so that the camera can measure the board with. Which is point three six. We're going to import our image. No, we want to display it in the original size. So we're going to size this thing so that it really fits the board. We want to use all of our board space. So we're just going to increase the size a little bit and make sure it fits on here. Select cut and then update our power settings. So we've run our test card. We're going to run ours at about 75% power and set the speed to seven and click process. Oops. We didn't remove the top name. So we can't have it hanging off the board like this. So we're just going to slide it up, select it, slide it up out the way. And now we'll click process again and click start. These in shades of pink. So we're going to be using our fantastic fuchsia and our Bunces Berry Blast. And our white is Ash Avenger. This one has lots of little cuts on it. So I'm going to pop that all over and then paint. Now you can paint with pieces in in an effort to not have it drip down in between. But doing it that way will sometimes paint your pieces into the frame. And that might be even harder to manage. So we go ahead and pop all our little pieces out first and then we paint. Now you might think that spray painting would be faster. And sometimes it is a little bit easier. But overall, because you're going to reuse your rollers, you can roll this. It'll be dry in three minutes. You'll put the second coat and be done. You don't have to wait nearly as long for it to dry. And you're not wasting all that paint with overspray. And you're not spray painting a piece of cardboard behind it or anything else. So that's just a little something I thought I'd share. Time to assemble. We're just going to use some star bond thick. Bring it all together. We'll start with this middle layer. So this one used two of those Glowforge boards, which would be about $11.66 in material cost. Plus a little bit of paint. It took about an hour to cut. We pay our laser $15 an hour. So we're at about $26, $29 I guess. If you want to add in maybe a box or so for shipping materials. And then it depends on how much profit margin you want to add. If you want to add a 50% profit margin, then you're talking about $45 for something this size. Or if you want to go 100% profit margin, you're looking at about a $60 sign. So I would say that was something like this. This is pretty close to one of our $55 signs. And I probably charged us about that much, $55 for one of these for this size. Now Garrett decided he needed to make one for his own man cave sign. Well I thought that one was looking pretty cool. So I needed my own man cave sign. I made it have some BMX theme through it. Of course his had to be bigger. So you would charge a lot more for something that size. Because that is using a lot larger board. More wood. He's actually got four layers on his. And a little more time in painting and materials. So I'd be closer to $70, $70 or so. I'd say $70, $75 for something this size. For something this many layers. Yeah. Step seven, marketing. We get asked a lot, how do you market the projects that you guys make? Well this would be great for social media. It's a personalized item. I would get good pictures. And I would really get video of this thing. Because it's 3D it's going to be hard to pick it up in just a single picture. You should pan across it. Maybe do some assembly videos. And get some shots where this thing might actually live in the end. So that folks can envision this in their space. So this one's going to sit on a floating shelf. I will take some final shots of it sitting in a bedroom on a shelf. So that if you wanted to give this as a gift, you can kind of envision what it would look like maybe in the bedroom. A teen's bedroom or a kid's bedroom. This one's going to go on the wall in my main cave. So get a couple of shots of this actually on a wall in a main cave. You need to be able to envision their own name in that area. And then you can also use AI to help create some of those images for you. There's lots of tools out there. So really those photos and then for someone to really envision what this is going to look like in their space. That's what's going to help sell this product. Big thanks to all of our patrons. We love you guys. That is the best way to support this channel. Joining us on Patreon where you'll get some extra content. Some SVGs, a super secret Facebook group, a Discord channel. Monthly Zoom calls and a monthly Illustrator class. There's lots of content out there. And lots of folks that you can interact with and learn from. So be sure to join us over on Patreon. Oh, mine's pretty easy because it's tall. And Garrett's about out of time. I'm about out of time. I gotta go get back to work. You gotta get back to work. And we will see you on Tuesday for a test cut Tuesday. I actually have my file ready. I'm ready to go. I just have to test it now.