From Spikeworld. | Spikeworld - The blog of textile artist Spike Dennis
Laser Cutting Induction
I had my induction with the laser cutter yesterday. On first glance at the rather large and very expensive laser cutting machine it would appear to be quite a daunting process. However, it’s surprisingly straight forward.
The machine can cut designs from vector images created in Adobe Illustrator. Fortunately this is a piece of software I’m already familiar with and so I’d already prepared some images to work with. The most difficult part of the laser cutting process seemed to be calibrating the machine for the different materials. I only tinkered with different grades of acrylic plastic as I was getting started so switching between sheets wasn’t too difficult.
Amongst the images I’d chosen to work with for this session was the logo for our Pack of Wolves collective. Originally created from a combination of hand cut paper and digital imagery I thought this image would contain plenty of detail to experiment with.
As you can see from the picture it took me a while to get to grips with programming the machine to engrave as it cut the shields out of the logo completely.
It was good to have an opportunity to work with the laser cutter. Whilst I theoretically already understood how the process works it’s not until experiencing the the process for myself that I was able to appreciate exactly what might be possible with a laser cutter in the contest of my own creative practice.
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