Designing and Laser Cutting a Layered Forestscape with Adobe Illustrator and Lightburn

This video shows my process for designing and cutting out a layered forestscape. I use Adobe Illustrator for the design process, Lightburn for the laser cutting setup, and my Atomstack A5 M50 Pro diode laser (5.5-watt).
I'm not an artist by any stretch, but this process gives me results that I'm happy with and I think it's overall a nice result that others might find useful. If you have any suggestions for improving the methods I use, I would love to hear them in the comments below (I'm always looking to improve).
The layers will be cut out of a 300mm x 300mm piece of 1/16" balsawood that I got from Amazon. The boards are fairly low quality so they tend to be bowed or warped. In this video, the bowing was bad enough that it clipped the laser head and I had to reposition and cut the last layer a second time.
Here's a link to a zip file container the Adobe Illustrator file, the Lightburn project, and the 3 layers exported as PNG files for anyone who would like to try it out: cubicleninja.com/Forest-Lands...
00:00 Intro and Disclaimer
01:29 Adobe Illustrator - Project Setup
04:42 Adding the First Tree
09:38 More Trees
10:17 Adding Grass / Ground Clutter
12:22 Finishing Layer 1
13:14 Layers 2 and 3
15:38 Wrapping up Illustrator
17:47 Lightburn Project Setup
23:01 Laser Cutting
24:12 Finished Results

[@antisocial5571]

The Bob Ross of laser cutting. :) loved it

[@davidtyler2060]

ROFL

[@CubicleNinja]

I didn't mess up my tree, it's just a happy little accident

[@kendispoto6871]

Nicely done. 2 Questions... Do you clean or seal the edges to avoid smudging? Are the two patterns available?

[@CubicleNinja]

It depends on how I'm going to be using them. For some of them, I use them as art that will be hung somewhere and I will either paint / stain the layers different shades of a color and then seal them for durability. I also like to use these to make customizable nightlights (going to be doing a video of that soon) and, for those, depending on the end result I'll either leave it completely natural or paint them to match the color of the nightlight box.
I edited the video description and added a link to a zip file containing all of the profile files I used in the video. Good luck!