Cute Ghost Laser Cut UV Print Tutorial

Getting these pocket ghosts to come out right was quite the process. First you need to find your art and make sure it's okay to use it commercially if you plan to sell the products you make with it. We found these cute ghosts on Canva and then found the corresponding files on Etsy and purchased the download that allows us to use it commercially.

The first step is to put your files into the EufyMake  software. The program is pretty forgiving, accepting many file types. We used jpegs.

To get the see-through ghost effect, we used clear 1/8" acrylic. Put the clear acrylic on the print bed, masked side down. It will make it easier to cut the ghosts out later if you don't remove the masking from the back of the acrylic at this stage.

Since you will be printing on the back of the acrylic, you'll want to put your color layer down first, and then the white layers. Here are our settings.

After these have printed, move the acrylic sheet to your laser bed. We used our XTool P3 laser which is great for cutting acrylic. 

You'll need to import the same picture files into the XTool software that you did into the EufyMake program. Once those are on your screen, offset each ghost so you have an outline. Set the outline to cut.

You can either delete your colored ghost jpegs or set them so that they are not printed.

Your laser will take a snapshot of the acrylic you have put inside. Align your cutouts with the pictures of the ghosts you printed. This is the tricky part. You'll have to eyeball it. They don't need to be perfect, but you don't want to lose any of your printed ghosts either. You can see some of the ghosts below weren't aligned just right.

For our laser and the acrylic we chose, we set the power to 80% and the speed to 10 mm/s. It cut straight through, no problems.

Pull your cuts out of the laser and peel the backing off and you'll have your ghosts all ready to put magnets on or to just have in your pocket for safe keeping. Let us know if you have any questions.

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Testing out a New UV Printer

 We ordered a Eufy Make UV printer last year and got it earlier this year. Right after we finally got brave enough to open the box and learn how to use it, we got our first order for some colored door hangers and got thrown in at the deep end.

UV Printing is different from anything we've done before. Here are some things we learned along the way.

The order we got was for these door hangers. We started out by cutting the shapes out of wood on our XTool laser and then used a jig to place the wood to be printed on. It was tricky and used a ton of UV ink--which btw is pricey.

                  

After fulfilling this order, we tried some door hangers of our own, but we made them less ink heavy. The door hanger order needed multiple layers of white ink below the colors and we ended up using two ink cartridges on 25 of them. The Eufy Make cartridges are about $40 a piece.

For our own test, we cut three door hangers out on the laser and then used the rest of the wood for a jig.

We learned quickly that using a rubber mat under projects helps with overspray issues on the Eufy Make mat that comes with the machine. We also used painters tape to secure the jig because it ended up slipping on us when we didn't.

Finally, we printed our three designs. It took two tries since we didn't realize we needed to do an ink test every time we installed a new cartridge. Well, you do.

The colors turned out vibrant. Overall, we are pretty happy with our Eufy Make purchase. We will probably keep making mistakes as we learn how to use it. Tutorials from product testers have been very helpful. If you're trying this for the first time, good luck!

You can see our doorhanger listings at https://bisonandbobcatstudio.etsy.com/listing/4391057623 in our Etsy shop.