Alyssa Phillips - Laser Cut

Concept: I started to brainstorm what I wanted to create for my laser cut by making some sketches in my notebook. I began by drawing some alien figures that I created when I was younger, and keeping with the space theme, I progressed into this sketch of a kid walking their alien dog on a far away planet. The image of someone walking down the street with their pet can seem so ordinary, but I find it funny that perhaps there are other humanoid life forms in distant galaxies that do the exact same thing every day.

Technique: I began the process of creating the laser cut file by uploading my sketch into illustrator, vectoring it, scaling it to an RGB 8x10 image, and then using image trace to go over the lines. This screenshot doesn't really highlight the 0.01 scale engraving lines, but you can clearly see the parts I intended to raster (the base of the helmet, the armband, my signature, and the mountains in the background). I had used yellow colored curves to create a heavy engrave for the mountains, and then I expanded the curves, which made them thick enough for rastering. After I got everything traced and cleaned up in Illustrator, I imported the file into the laser cut template in Rhino. 

When I imported the file, Rhino did not transfer the black fill in for the pieces of the space suit that I wanted rastered, and the lines of my signature were also not thick enough to be rastered. The heavy engrave yellow curves used to create my mountains were still expanded, so I went ahead and left the file that way since I really wanted the background to stand out against the foreground. As you can see, I also added a moon above the mountains to be engraved. Once I assigned the different engraves to their appropriate layers in the template and made sure the image was scaled appropriately and within the outer cut, I placed my material (clear plexiglass) into the laser cutting machine and this is what came out:

Materials: As mentioned above, I used a clear sheet of acrylic plexiglass to laser cut my image. I went with this material because it seemed like a less organic feel (ie. wood), and more like a high-tech, sleek material that fits with my space concept. The mountains in the background turned out really well because of the double lines and how deep the cut was. The plexiglass came with a protective clear cover over it, which I kept on during the cutting process, so that when it was finished, I could peel off pieces of the it and leave on other parts to give a frosted effect.  The image on the right shows the laser cut at an angle away from the wall that shows the shadows given off by the plexiglass, which is a cool effect given to the piece.