Lazer Cutter Trial (NEW WAY OF WORKING)

13/11/15


Lazer Cutting:

for this small side project we have been given the opportunity to experiment with the laser cutter to explore a new way of making work to come.

Eric Standley: 




Gabriel Schama

Laster cutting tools were developed for industrial manufacturing, but that didn’t deter artist Gabriel Schama from adopting the tech and giving the age-old art of woodcutting a digital upgrade.

Schama says he used to work exclusively in cut paper, spending weeks and hundreds of x-acto blades carving out a single design. Shifting his process to the digital realm, he says, has allowed him to open his work up a great deal in terms of depth and complexity. He draws inspiration from a wide range of sources, including Buddhist mandalas, Persian rugs, and baroque church ceilings.

Some Examples Of His Work:

Nando Costa: 

(The New America)

A Pacific Northwest artist becomes infatuated with the process of laser engraving wood and hatches a plan for a stop motion animation featuring hundreds of engraved maple blocks that can later be mailed as rewards to his project’s Kickstarter donors.The sort of project a guy with his skills and experience could have knocked out in a couple of months had the chosen materials been magic markers or clay.

Two years and some 800 wood blocks later, The New America is finally available for viewing, all two minutes and 37 seconds of it. Costa describes the abstract storyline as “a union between concepts and experiments born during the Situationist movement and real life events experienced during the last few years in American society. Particularly the duality between the economic downturn and the shift in values and beliefs of many citizens.”
                       
This video shows how this technique can be applied to motion design to make an incredible and breath taking animation that has taken perseverance and patience.

Andre Maat:
(woodoo)
                     
WOODOO from Andre Maat on Vimeo.

Another example of the use of laser cutting in animation is this video woodoo by andre maat. For this video he wanted to play with the shape and consistency of wood and bring it to life. He used stop motion to do this and lots of different shapes of wood in order to make them look as though they are moving

I have decided for this small project that i want to try and create a mandala style pice using the laser cutter.
I found some interesting shapes that would be fairly easy to make on the laser however:

What i managed to create:

           

Shadow pictures of the mandala:

Shadow pictures on a coloured background: