It's done!! A couple days ago, I received a little message from one of my artist friends after a hiatus from both of us! They gave me an adorable little gif with a pixel art message! I was told to use it for determination, and here we are! It will now motivate me as a piece of decoration on my workshop wall!  The pixel art actually turned out fantastic!! I isolated a frame of the gif and put it through a small mini program I made in blender to turn the image into a 3d model, separated by color! I spent a total of around 3 hours sanding down the letters to a nice, soft finish. I really like how the pixel art looks soft and smooth. First time I've printed pixel art. The 3d printer makes a really cool tune when moving straight up and over for the pixels instead of in a curved path.

The pixels were printed using big nozzles(.8mm diameter instead of the standard .4mm) I was really excited to have a project that took advantage of these big nozzles. It's always fun to see a solid, fat extrusion from the 3d printer, finding the fine balance between how much filament your printer can heat up in time to extrude, and what speeds you can maintain to create consistent extrusions. The total time for this project in machine time was around 6 hours to print the letters, and 3 hours to engrave and cut the wooden back-plate. 

I needed something to hang it on, but wasn't sure what at first. As it came together, I decided to make a custom texture for the back-plate. I wanted to do something inspired by pixel art, so I got to work. What I came up with came out alright, but I think I could have done much better. The resulting texture on the back-plate is made up of warped pixels, an effect somewhat similar to putting a magnet up to an old crt tv! If I did this project again, I think I'd laser cut a stencil and spray paint a pattern onto the wood. I think the engraving lacks a bit of color, and feels a bit flat because of it. That's okay though. I learned some new methods of making textures, and I'm definitely going to be exploring that route later!

The artist in question who was kind and thoughtful enough to make me the little gif is JuanPuerto99Link! (Link!) Thanks again for the kind message, I really like having something in my workshop that reminds me to keep innovating using the tools I have!