Julio Romero: Laser Cut

Last semester I laser cut a box that had a side inspired by an old charcoal drawing I had made, so I chose to instead focus solely on the armadillo, instead of making it a smaller part of something else. I wanted to explore how changing the techniques used in the design would affect the final outcome. I also wanted to make something that could serve a purpose other than decoration.

I did the majority of my work in Rhino, bringing in an image of my drawing and working loosely off of it. I began with 2 circles, one inside the other, and then used a curve that I polar arrayed to create the outer spiral. I copied the starting curve, mirrored it and then used another polar array to create the sections of the armadillo. The ear, head, and feet were created using multiple curves. I split each curve at every intersection, joined them into quadrilateral shapes, and offset them inwards. I finished up by trimming the parts of the spiral curves that intersected with the armadillo.

I imported the curves into Illustrator, where I added grey and black fill to the armadillo for raster engraving, and used deep, shallow, and medium cut curves on top of a 5 inch circle to cut out. I also made another 3 inch version of it, without the spiral and using only inner cuts, instead, which could be used either for decoration or as a stencil. After having all of the pieces cut out, I glued the pieces that were cut out of the second armadillo onto a blank circle to use as a stamp.