Sarah Cepeda Project 3 - Makercase Lamp

So, actually, I scrapped my original lamp concept. I decided to go for a much more open design so that I could have more light and make more use of the "lamp" aspect. I decided to go for a wide white stroke concept, essentially working in negative space. 

I started by finding some flowers that had some well developed lines within them. I settled on roses, plumerias, daisies, and calla lilies. 

After settling on some good reference images, I drew up some graphics, took pictures of them and converted them into svgs using adobe capture which did most of the work of converting them into black and white along with some clean-up. Fortunately, adobe capture scans and creates compound shapes which meant I could then release the shapes and end up with the negative space images you see below by deleting the strokes. I fixed any issues in Illustrator before importing the file into Rhino.

Unfortunately for me, at some point I completely forgot I was supposed to do the stems as vector engravings and I made them all as hatches... I did not realize this mistake until I was importing into Lightburn to use the machine at the Maker Space, however, so I improvised a font name for each of the flowers on the lamps as it was 2 AM the night before I had to leave for the holidays and my only change to print. As a result, you may (or may not) notice a slight change in the design between this one and the final product. 

For the 3D model, after importing from Illustrator I simply made planar curves of the outer cuts, extruded them .25" down, extruded curves on the inner cuts 1" both directions and boolean differenced them. For the raster, I exploded it, took the resulting planar curve and extruded it down .125" before boolean differencing it as well. 

For the final render, I used a Varathane Premium Kona Brown Wood Stain that falsely advertised "color in 1 coat" as well as "dries in 1 hour". It has been 3 days since the initial coat and we're still sticky to the touch and staining everything from hands to paper to tables. I did like the concentration of the stain in that a little did go a much longer way, but I erred in that I chose the cheapest brush and it just so happened to be barely able to fit into the can which made life a little harder. 

It is difficult to make out in the lit images, but there are the names of the flowers underneath them in vector engravings as evidenced by the final picture. I intended to paint them another color or mask them, but they were so small of letters and the paint refused so adamantly to dry that I could never get around to it. Additionally, the negative space created a nice puppet show effect that I think in the future I would like to capitalize more on.