Category: Piecing It Together

This was my midterm for Piecing It Together. I created a layered illustration using the artwork from a videogame character. It turned out well despite having some issues with alignment of the sheets.

I decided to continue with this method for my final but using my own art and resolving some issues like alignment and being able to easily display the work.

My solution was to make sure every artboard can easily be related to eachother. By creating holes near each corner, I can make sure all the paths are aligned and also a washer, nut and bolt combo to keep the piece together at the same time.

I used a digital painting I made for the final. Among a lot of the feedback Eric gave, he recommended using a light source for the final. So I plan on attaching LED strips to the edges for some dynamic lighting using an Arduino and touch sensor.

Longer explanation than submission.

I am confident I will be able to finish and put fine touches on this by next week.

Everything seemed to be going as planned.

For my midterm in Piecing It Together I initially chose to make a model of a mech I designed in 3D some years ago.  Considering I have not yet kicked the tires of the CNC Router yet I figured it would be best to tackle this in some form as a final project.  Learning from the  issues I experienced with my irregular box project and trying to maximize my time utilization, I decided to buy a vinyl cutter so I can do most of the prototyping at home.

For my project I decided to make a 3 or 4-tone illustration using transparent material like acrylic. My other material would probably be wood. I am envisioning making an enclosure for the image and it being at least 4 layers deep. I included some examples of this illustration style below.

My first steps are to reduce my picture to 3 or 4 colors.  Create each color in a new layer in Photoshop.  I’ll then import these layers into Illustrator and trace them out with the pen tool. To prototype I will cut these patterns on thick paper and plastic sheets with the vinyl cutter. After the prototyping phase is complete I’ll model the sculpture in my 3d software and determine what materials to buy this weekend.

For this assignment, my inspiration was the limited methods I had to construct an irregular box.
I decided to approach this project in Softimage with extruded polygons.  This works well because the methods we have available to fabricate also depends on flat surfaces with a uniform thickness. Or so I thought…
Softimage has no real world base unit to modify (as far as I could tell). The designer has to keep in mind 1 unit in XSI is 1 inch, for example.

I exported my model as 10 objects. Then imported them into 123D. That process was okay but not so obvious for beginners. I made a critical mistake which would come back to haunt me. For some reason the scaling feature is automatically enabled. When I exported the Vector cuts they were not proportional to my other pieces.
I converted the EPS files into the AI formats that the laser print driver natively reads. The actual laser cutting process isn’t too complicated once you’ve gone through it a few times.
I knew prototyping is very important but due to unexpected constraints I went with acrylic and learned an expensive hard lesson. Next time around I know what to expect from this process and will be sure to prototype.

This was an interesting read. The writer was aware of some of the issues that stems from the “maker” movement. It’s a strange thing to digest as it still depends heavily on the exports of 3rd world countries to succeed. As $19 cups of coffee take over Brooklyn, what does the end of maker cities look like?

Looking forward to the class discussion.

Part of our homework was to practice using the pen tool in Illustrator.

This is a picture of the object I used for our first exercise.