Please read!
I'm aware that this is late and probably won't count, but I've wanted to post the photos that I took and the work that I did so I'm making this post just because! This project was one of my favorites this semester and something I got to start before everything imploded in other areas of my life SO I am just going for it, because it was fun and awesome to do and I want to share that with everyone.
Concept:
As we discussed from the first project, I have a keen interest in the paranormal, the unseen world, the unusual, and from there, I wandered how I might translate this into the box project. I had a ridiculous amount of ideas and I stored them away in hopes that I might to get to create them in the future, but that's an entirely different discussion, back to the matter at hand:
When I first began my search, I decided to peruse some of my favorite brands for inspiration: Wicked Clothes and CalamityWare.
Wicked Clothes is an online clothing store that sells a vast selection of graphic t-shirts with quirky, spooky, and occult-inspired themes. Stylistically, I knew I wanted the box to have some depth or detail, but I couldn't determine what I wanted the theme to be exactly.
Next up I began perusing
CalamityWare, a brand that sells beautiful porcelain ware that has a fun twist! They feature a variety of dinosaurs, aliens, and mythological beasts and creature hidden away in the details of the patterns. I loved the idea of incorporating something with intricate detail, although I wanted my design to be a bit less subtle then Calamityware. It was actually after I purchased a few of these products for Christmas (YES I know I was early, but this has been a brutal year and I wanted to make sure I got presents for my family and friends and had them ready because the holidays are rough in general...tack on a pandemic and serious mental frazzle and it becomes a living nightmare) that I had my A-HA moment!
My boyfriend loves personalized items, even more so when they feature themes that are of interest to himself and I, so I chose to do a 'space' themed box. The photographic style astronaut was meant to be representative of Will - clear and straightforward, quirky, - and the astrological wheel was intended to be representative of myself - ambiguous, requires interpretation, detail oriented - so that both of us would be in the same box. Once I decided what my theme and reason were, I swiftly moved on to the fun bit.
Technique:
The first thing I did was set up my box using
Makerscase which allowed me to make a box with teeth. I chose the sizing 10" x 8" x 4" for two very specific reasons: I wanted it to be the same size as the boxes we were ordering for my capstone project Let It Out, and I wanted it to be large enough to fit the small scrapbook I made for Will while also having enough for small cute items to fill it with. I thought long and hard about whether I intended to make the design a lamp and ultimately I decided that, based on what I wanted my design to look like and its purpose, I would keep it as a box instead. In the future, though, I have a few designs that I think would be easily adaptable to a lamp and do intend to one day create those.
Once I decided on the structure, I had to decide whether I'd create the design with Rhino or Adobe Illustrator and, in the end I decided to use Illustrator because I'm a lot more comfortable using it over Rhino and I felt that I would enjoy the process more (which I did) because of that familiarity with the program. I began with the astronaut and utilized an image I found on the internet. I used the make and expand image trace tool and modified the parameters to maintain the black and white cut out while also maintaining some of the detail present in the photo. Then I mapped and aligned the astronaut to the elongated sides of the box and cut out any 'unnecessary' material.
The astrology wheel took much longer than the astronaut, despite having an easier gradation to work with. Like the astronaut I used the image trace tool, then I had to go through each and every symbol and smooth out any jagged edges lines - I also took the liberty of making some slight modifications to them. Afterwords, I stripped the wheel entirely and recreated it because the image trace left it in shambles, but I tried to recreate it to look similar. After the clean up, I began to contemplate which areas I wanted engraved, which areas I wanted to stand out and how I was going to cut the wheel in half and reflect it onto the other side - truly the most frustrating part of the project.
In order to reflect the wheel, I first had to slice it in half, then I reflected it across the y-axis AND the x-axis (so that it read correctly). I did have to make some changes, such as, to keep the letters where they were, I had to manually move the astrological illustrations to align with the appropriate text. After I finally laid the box out, I decided to finish it off by modifying the 8" layers to be more rounded. I thought it would accentuate the astrological wheel more appropriately and reduce blank space that wasn't adding anything to the design. Off the the wood shop it went after that, where I experienced the other problem of COVID restrictions and regulations.
Materials:
For materials, I chose to use plywood for the basis because its cheap and I knew I wanted to use a material that would bring a little bit of warmth back into the design. If possible, in the future, I'd be interested in remaking the box with a thicker plywood so that when it's being laser cut, the burns will be more defined.
When the box came out of the laser cutter, the first thing I did was start planning out how I would better define the areas to enrich the color of the natural wood without masking its quality. I chose to use a watered down acrylic paint (that was sealed afterwords) because I knew I could mix colors to get the desired 'stain' look I was seeking and because I knew that I could water down the colors and easily wipe them off if I had didn't like the way it looked. One thing I wasn't anticipating was how porous wood is, it quickly absorbed the acrylic which meant I had to work quickly to make sure that it would look consistent.
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