yamatetsu

A guide to tinkering with the photo: To do the second one, I used Faststone Image Viewer (free picture viewer) to crop the image. Then I viewed the picture, zoomed in and used a screen capture program to get that picture. I use an online photo editor to apply 'artsy' effects to the picture (https://www.befunky.com/create/) . For example, this is 'charcoal'. Note that this program uses AI, so the result may differ a bit from the original image. I do several pictures with various effects. Since the editor is not a free program, I just zoom the picture and use the screen capture program to get my image. You'll notice that the picture has a watermark in the lower left corner. Those pictures I put through https://online.rapidresizer.com/photograph-to-pattern.php and tinker around until I get a good pattern or give up, since some pics are just not suitable to be turned into a pattern with this method.

I don't get what you see in this, but it sure is not suited to do a pattern out of it. I wouldn't want to cut something like this, simplifying it by making it into a 'traditional' pattern would probably make it ugly as heck, because you would lose a lot of detail.

"Elephants & bears in rocking chairs" Roughly 14cm x 15cm x 18mm, done with a hand held fretsaw with a #3 blade. Found these while looking for scroll saw patterns. Each one took about an hour of sawing through 18mm wood and two hours of sanding. Fun fact: The wood they're made of is the scrapwood they're standing on, after a lot of sanding and two coats of linseed oil.

@Scrappile: If you're still thinking about doing fretsaw work, take a look at this vid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Anu1VniA8X0 At about 4:00 in, you can see the setup he uses as a 'workbench'. This is similar to what I use, except my box isn't angled and mine is not as 'tall' so I can use it while sitting.

No, that's not my cup of tea.

I also have the knack of finding projects that take far more work / time than I anticipate.

"Spidey" 46,5cm x 37cm, backer board 8mm, Spidey 4mm thick, 'cheap' DIY store ply, done with a hand held fretsaw with a #3 blade. This was my first complex one. Every single piece is a floater, cut out by hand, sanded, painted and glued in. Took me about three weeks.

Reverse searching this image probably won't help you. If you look for this you will find that it's basically an ad for people/shops selling personalized wood puzzles. These are shops that let you enter a name, then they will send you the puzzle, charging by letter. So Anne-Christine McDowell-Smithereens would be really expensive Try googling 'personalized wooden puzzle name'.

Behold! I am Yamatetsu, Destroyer Of Dreams !!! ... Just try it, it's an inexpensive hobby, it's fun and it's easy to learn. Some tips: Try to get hold of this type of saw. I'm from Germany, I don't know if you can buy those worldwide. You have to have some kind of board to put your workpiece on. Do NOT use something like this. These boards are tiny, if you cut a big piece, you have to press it really hard against the cutting board to keep it from wobbling around. Another downside is that the clamp is rubbish, it can't keep the cutting board in place. I use a worktable (essentially just a big box with weights in it) and a formica board that has a smooth surface. I cut the hole/triangle shape (which is where your blade goes while sawing) out. The board is bigger than the table so I've got an overhang, I just clamp the rear end to the table and I'm good to go. The overhang allows me to move the saw up and down below it without hitting the table. One last tip: When putting the blade into the saw, I clamp the 'arms' of the saw together a bit, this gives me a bit more tension on the blade, which I think is absolutely neccessary. Oh, and you can forget about using spiral blades, reverse blades and 2/0 blades. The 2/0s are so flat that the wingnut fretsaw can't hold them at all, and you have to tighten the lever on the lever fretsaw real hard, which means that eventually you will overtighten it and then it's kaput. So the smallest blade I use is a #1.

I wouldn't recommend it for someone your age (no disrespect). It's physically very taxing, as you have to use one hand/arm to press the wood down and rotate it so that you can follow a curve with the saw, while the other arm moves (more or less) rapidly up and down, guiding the the saw. Your body is locked in the same position for a long period of time while doing exhausting work. I'm 55, I can do it for two hours tops, and standing up after that looks a bit like doing it in slow motion while groaning and moaning. Then there is the problem of feeding the blade into the saw and secure it. When I started I used an oldschool fretsaw that uses wingnuts to secure the blade. That meant loosening the blade at the top, flipping the board over, feeding the blade through the pilot hole, using one hand to press down the board amd simultaneously clamp down the arms of the saw to get the right tension, and use the other hand to position the blade and screw the wingnut tight. Screwing a small wingnut tight, pressing the nut against your thumb and index finger, really starts to hurt after doing it multiple times. Nowadays I use a fretsaw that has a lever mechanism to lock the blade. You feed the blade through a hole and use a lever like this to fasten the blade. You can basically do this just with your index finger. So, using a fretsaw for a long time is exhausting, and, well, it also takes a long time. I'd guesstimate that using a machine is 3-4 times faster than doing it by hand.

Unfortunately that doesn't work too well. I probably am cutting at a significantly lower speed than a machine, and that shows. You can practically hear the wood screaming as I'm tearing through it, and the cut looks like something chewed it's way through.

"Sisyphus meets Indiana Jones" 45 x 60cm, backer boards 4mm, landscape 4mm, Sisyphus & Indy 4mm, 'cheap' DIY store ply, done with a hand held fretsaw with a #1 blade. Found this online-cartoon by Mark Parisi ("Off the Mark"), just had to do it. That look on Indy's face is priceless. This seems to be a simple pic, but it actually was a lot of work to get it done (cutting all those simple straight lines ... two holes to drill, sawing the line up, sawing the line down... about more than 150 times). It didn't help that it's too big for my fretsaw. Because of that, cutting the letters was tricky, I couldn't cut Sisyphus, Indy & the rocks out of the 'landscape' board, and some of the straight lines were tricky also. This time, I used stain instead of paint, looks great.

Yup, that was one of the complicated ones. I could only cut out 3-7 pieces at a time, and I had to cut them in a way that the 'frame' around them stayed intact, because I needed the frame as a reference for glueing. Cut some pieces, sand them, put the top board on the backer, align them, put glue on the pieces, drop them in, wait for the glue to set a bit, carefully lift off the top board, rinse and repeat.

A matter of preference. To me, light gray / red looks worse. I agree that I should have used a lighter grey in my earlier pic, but to me the contrast white paper / black line / light grey areas is way more visible that white paper / red line / light grey areas.