Today I spent a while at TechShop designing and cutting frames with the laser. Results were not fantastic, though I did learn a couple of useful tricks from a couple who was there engraving their wedding invitations onto wooden pieces: 1)Hydrogen Peroxide removes burn and char from the edges and surface of wood much better and more quickly than sanding, and 2) You can use color profiles when engraving to optimize the movement of the laser thus speeding up printing times. In other words, you can trick the laser into drawing in a certain order, so you group close together items together.

Anyway this first piece is part of the frame for the “Braille” piece.

You can see a cleaner region on the left side where I dabbed on some H2O2.  I’ll clean it all up.  The E’s, aside from loosely resembling a Greek motif, are the ones found on some eye tests.  As for whether there is a code, let’s just say that I did leave a little something to identify ME – after all, an artist should sign his work.

This frame will have a backing block to make it thick. In the frame will be a piece of glass on the surface, and then some braille text matted  well behind the glass.  Of course, there will be a magnifying glass focusing in on the text. As to what the text says: I’m not telling.

The rest of my time was less fruitful.  I am working on a fractal themed piece using the good old Mandelbrot Set as the theme.

Rotated Mandelbrot Set

It looks a bit like a magnifying glass, no?  In any case, I’d like to have a magnifying glass looking in at an image like that above.  Then, the frame itself would have a motif of repeated Mandelbrot images cutout (if I had to the end of time and an infinitely precise laser, I could represent it all).  Each of those would have small lenses which themselves would be showing the image of a magnifying glass.  I’ll let you figure out the fractal weirdness.

I tried twice.  The first time I completely forgot that I had carefully scaled the image so that the round “circle” was a tad smaller than a bunch of lenses that I have. That way they could fit in.  Here was the too-big result on some very thin plywood:

I think it was a mistake to zoom in on just the lower circle in the set.  I think I’ll use the full “heart” shape next time.  I then cut it again on some MDF with the result below.  The size is correct, and the lenses look cool (I trie back in the studio), but it came out looking rather sloppy:

My conclusion is to try some thin acrylic to get much better precision (not sure if opaque or clear would be better).

This last piece is a quickie that I will probably do out of mat board, but I had some scrap MDF around so I used that:

The cutout is essentially the shadow of a glass in front of it.  Not sure what I will put behind the hole yet.

I also designed, but did not yet cut out a frame for the “Does in the voice in your head sound like this?” piece.  Images will follow in the near future. Anyway, not the most successful day, but not a total loss either.