Laser-etching is a modern process that effectively carves a 1-bit image onto a material. A lot of very cool images can be made with it, given enough artistic talent. I’m not one of them.
Fortunately, all that heavy lifting has been done for me by artists far more talented than me. In the 16th century (and on), making and selling prints was popular with European artists.
That means that there’s a wealth of royalty-free images out there that lend themselves excellently to laser-etching, simply by googling the term “woodcut.”
Here are a couple things I’ve been doing in the background while designing something else.
[…] Another technique worth trying is crosshatching. That might work out really well, in the same way that it works for laser cutting. […]