Using a Laser Cutter to Make Art

Gabriel Fink — University of Minnesota

My name is Gabriel Fink and I am in the BIS program at CLA for art, technical communication, and mass communication. I am excited to share this project with everyone!

Brainstorming and Ideation

For me, I had a hard time thinking about how I would translate my skills with physical media to digital fabrication. Much of the work I have done in the past has not been very finely detailed, but I am mostly proficient with a pen. I am grateful that I can take shabby drawing and clean them up in Illustrator so that was my starting point for this project. I want to use acrylic and vinyl to create designs that are layered and larger in scale.

Idea One — Interlocking Rater Plates

Sketch of possible plate configuration

The first idea I have for this project is inspired by a children’s jigsaw puzzle. I thought about how I could use unique shapes to create an interesting presentation for several raster images. The final piece would likely be no larger than 18"x20" but would have varying parts with organic edges. I am interested in possibly making simple landscapes with borders within each segment of the plate. The images would be rasterized on MDF to preserve clarity of the images.

An example of the children’s jigsaw puzzle

Idea Two — Light Cube

Example sketch of the light cube

My second idea for this project is something like a 3D shadow box that would have a light source inside it that would project shadows in whatever space it was placed in. The plates of the box would likely be acrylic printed with vinyl images. To create the box, I would have to cut some segments of MDF to create the frame and include a way to slide the panes in, as well as create a way to open the box to access the light source. I think this is the most ambitious project of my three since my carpentry skills aren’t exactly top notch.

Example of a 2D shadow box

Idea Three — Vinyl Frame

Sketch of the vinyl frame

My last idea for this project is several sheets of framed vinyl that will be layered atop one another to create a whole image. I would cut the vinyl with my design and sandwich the edges between the edges of the MDF frame and pin them to the back like stretching a canvas if possible. I am hoping that several pieces of vinyl will be strong enough to stay intact if framed. I might consider adding support to the middle of the frame to make it so the wear on the vinyl is not as intense. I think this would be a fun project to experiment with translating some of the more colorful aspects of my work to digital fabrication since vinyl is such a varied material.

I wouldn’t stretch the vinyl this way but it was my inspiration

Hopefully these ideas represent how I would like to move forward with this project. One lucky idea will will have the opportunity to become a (hopefully much more refined) reality!

Initial File Work

I decided to do a hybrid a of a few of my ideas for my project. I am going to do a laser cut box with an open top and raster images on the four visible sides with the images cut out of the box.

Here are the images I prepared for rasterization, as well as the color versions for fun.

Blue Mushroom

Green Mushroom

Orange Mushroom

Purple Mushroom (the image is stretched horizontally on here for some reason)

The black and white version of the blues

Black and white orange

Purple in black and white

Black and white green

For each of the black and white images, I need to cut out just the mushroom portion of each image so that I can insert them on to my box in the proper areas and outline them to be cut out from each façade. The images look dark because I adjusted their brightness and contrast, as well as the color levels in each image to make them as accurate to the color version as possible.

My box template from MakerCase

Overall I think this project is coming along well, but I still have a good amount of work to do before my files are ready for fabrication.

Final Assembly

After finishing my designs I added my mushroom images onto my laser cut file to be rasterized. My first attempt at rasterizing my images did not turn out so great.

Botched raster images

As you can see, my initial images were way too dark and did not have enough contrast for the raster etch to show up well. So I tried again after messing with the levels of my images in Photoshop to create a well defined raster image. I was much more satisfied with my second result.

Better raster etch

This one turned out much better, so I moved on to assembling my box. All I had to do was put a dab of glue on each joint and slot them together.

Drying with rubber bands in place

I did not do anything to the wood because I liked the laser cut finish with the burned edges. I might paint the mushrooms on my botched box at a later date just for a fun alternate version of this project.

Here is a few photos of my finished box.

The formerly purple shroom

The orange shroom turned out nice

Still a bit dark but it works

My favorite raster etch

Thanks for checking out my project!