Christopher Rickett: Laser Engraving

Concept: After learning about the assignment, I immediately knew that I wanted to do a raster image for my laser engraving. I wanted to create a piece that was purposely unrecognizable, sort of like  macro photography. My final design was a sort of off kilter Rorschach using white, black and 50% gray.

Technique: I started with an image of a paint splatter I had created, and gray-scaled it, I then mirrored the image across both horizontally and vertically, rotated the entire image so that it sat at an angle and posterized it. I also messed with some exposure and saturation levels to limit the number of gray-scale levels there were.

End Result: The end result was rather interesting and I learned something from it.  While the original image was very clean, it did not print well on the material that I had chosen, that being plywood. It came out a little "muddy", but it overall I think it is still quite a beautiful piece. I would like to try it again, maybe printing on a different material, of possible inverting the colors to reduce the amount of negative space making the shapes stand out a little more.