10/1: Laser Cutter

3D PAPER DOLLS

Danielle, Ren and I created 3-D Paper dolls of ourselves for our decorative laser cutter project. I first thought of the idea of a paper doll after seeing the example of the house of cards. I was thinking of 2-Dimensional objects that kids can build to stand and thought about standing dolls. After discussing the idea in depth with Danielle, we came up with the idea of making dolls of ourselves, and when Ren joined our group after being absent in class, we knew we had to make a set of three!

We began the process by photographing ourselves standing in a similar "doll-like" pose and started our original work in Photoshop because we all felt we had more experience creating manipulations there. After turning our photographs to black and white, we also added filters to make the image look more graphic with some "drawing" features, more similar to what you might see on a paper doll, and then created an outline around each form that also included a half-circle as its base We also created three additional identical half circles to make our pieces stand. Our next task was to transfer the files into Illustrator format, so that our outline was traced as a vector and our images of ourselves were formatted correctly as rasters. Although we faced some trial and error with this process, we were able to use the kind support of the staff in the Myers Media Art Studio, as well as the Thing Space, to help where we had further questions. Once our files were correctly formatted and lined up we printed them on the laser cutter. From the wonderful suggestion of Kristina, we created the slots to connect our pieces outside of the machine and also got to get some experience with a jewelry saw (see Danielle below!).

The process of using the laser cutter itself is incredibly quick and convenient and could be easily applied to a huge range of subjects! The main trick is really getting the digital formatting correct and making sure that all measurements and other mathematical aspects of your different files are aligned. While both Illustrator and Photoshop are filled with a multitude of ruler tools, I am much more accustomed to making my measurements by hand and being able to see and physically line up different components as needed. Synthesizing the organization I would usually do in 3-Dimensions and by hand instead in the 2-Dimensional technical world of applications was a bit of a transition for me and I found myself wanting to double (and triple, etc. etc.) check that everything would line up and work. That being said, we also found that it was easy to send separate layers to the printer which allowed the alignment process to be confirmed visually, which was a big help and an understanding that would definitely make things easier in the future. A lot of the confusion we faced can be attributed to trying it all out for the first time, and it is now, in hindsight, that I can say I would feel much more confident taking the adventure on knowing what we already have figured out!