laser cutting

Northern Cardinal

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One of the first watercolour brooches I experimented with was of a cardinal, so I thought that for today’s Avian August prompt I would revisit the laser cutter.

Somehow I nailed the design on the first sketch:

And from there I could see that the piece would work either as a painted or acrylic piece!

There was a slight tricky bit to solve with how to depict the eye in the acrylic version – would the whole face piece be black acrylic and the white parts painted in? I instead opted to cut the eye out of white acrylic and to etch a section into that that I painted black.

Image

I didn’t realise how dark my sheet of red acrylic was but I didn’t have any alternatives on hand so it’ll have to do. I really like how this little cute birb came out, and it was another speed lasercut build which has me thinking that I might spend September with the aim to do more regular laser work……….

Frosted acrylic nightlight

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Lately, my dad has been making beautiful carved wooden lamps. And every now and then, he asks me to cut some mirror acrylic on my laser cutter to place into his lamps.

Tonight was one such occasion, and since I was going to head to my parents’ place for dinner, I thought I’d take the opportunity of the laser machine being spun up to also make a lamp of my own and test it out with the LEDs that dad has been using to test his lamps. This is the result.

This is a real speed build. While I’ve been wanting to do something like this for ages, o hadn’t ever managed to bring it to fruition because of the little decisions required. What size should it be? Should I cut tabs for a better piece alignment? What opacity of acrylic should I use? What should the silhouette design feature?

With a tight turnaround time imposed, I threw all those questions aside and went with a simple design. I realised I could also speed up the prototyping by using both the positive and negative shape of the silhouette for the adjacent faces, thus cutting down on wasted test material. The design was drafted on the bus trip home from work, and the light box was test-assembled using sticky tape. It’s very shoddy but proves the concept!

I was planning to use 2mm white acrylic for the leaf shapes, but it turned out I didn’t have a large enough sheet. By chance, I had a bit of cardboard on hand AND I guessed the correct settings to cut it on my laser cutter. The cardboard does the job fine!

From here – I guess I should properly glue up the box and work out how the light will be positioned and how it’d turn off and on… but I suspect that those questions may be left hanging for a while.

Hand-Painted Callie and Marie Brooches

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As promised, here’s my next experiment in laser-cutting + watercolour detailing. I’m really happy with the results!

Here are some extra pictures to show you the process from idea to finished product.

As usual, it all starts with a sketch!

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Once I’m happy with the sketch, I trace over it with vector lines in Illustrator and use these to laser cut my designs. Remember what I said yesterday about priming the MDF and masking it? I do the exact same thing with these!

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The technique for painting these is also the same as in yesterday’s post! I peel the masking off each area that I want to paint, going from darker colours to lighter ones. I then apply colour in careful washes of watercolour paint.

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Once they’re done, I apply a gloss varnish over them. This protects the watercolour paint and gives things a nice smooth feel.

I need to work out a good process for sealing the paint before putting the varnish on, as you can see with the picture below some of the colours bled or faded a bit when I put the varnish on.

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There’s some variation between each piece – even though they have the same lineart they are each hand painted and finished!

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Pins on the back so that I can use them as brooches. I’m also testing to see if they are durable enough to use on keyrings.

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Okay that’s all for today – Stay Fresh!

Splatoon Squid Pins

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It’s that time of year again – Blaugust!

I’ll be attempting to blog once a day, but my posts this year will be relatively light-on. Also looking at my posting schedule it’s even more fan-art based than usual.

So with that said, let’s kick off Splatoon week!

Splatoon has been slowly consuming all my free time with its tight gameplay and colourful world. So it’s no wonder that I’ve been doing art based around it!

squidpins

These little guys are a little over an inch each and are laser cut on my new shiny laser engraving machine. (That in itself deserves a blog post I don’t feel qualified to write yet).

I first prime the MDF with a gesso that makes it suitable for painting watercolours on. Then I put masking tape over the top to protect the surface of the MDF. After engraving the design into the squids, I lift the masking on the areas that I’ll be painting black.

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I use acrylic paint or a black marker to fill in the black parts and after letting it dry I move on to the coloured part, which I fill in with a watercolour wash. I’m able to mix a multitude of bright, awesome colours with my watercolour paints, making each pin unique.

Finally, the squids are sealed over with a spray varnish. I have to use at least one layer of spray varnish as any varnish applied with a brush or sponge risks smearing the watercolour paint.

This multi-media approach to laser engraved designs is something I hope to expand on! I’ll share another experiment tomorrow.

Want your own Squid Pin? Head over to my store and grab one for yourself!

Three-Dee Thursdays #2: AVCon 2014 Trophies

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This week I’m showing off the trophies I made at AVCon!

Once again, these were made of laser cut acrylic. The dragon design was done by design-team member Dima. I worked out the trophy design from that.

The overall look is simpler than last year’s – I had a bit less time to mess around with the designs.

Here’s the first prototype:

prototype

And here are a bunch of completed trophies!

finals

This year I sent a bunch of the laser work off to be done by a local business. They were great to work however the cutting side of the acrylic seemed to pick up dust or discolouration or something. It was rather disappointing to find the finish on some of the trophies wasn’t as nice as I’d have liked. I also found out just how drastically the thickness of acrylic sheets can vary and how different laser cutters can have noticeably different kerf widths.