Last week I did a short course on laser cutting at Metropolitan works in London.  It was great fun and really interesting to try something new. As part of the course we got an introduction to the whole process of Laser cutting (and water jet cutting).  We had to bring in a project that we wanted to have cut. The course is free so its a great way to learn about to the processes first hand.  The other members of the course were all artists and designers so it was great to meet some new people and see their work.

My initial thoughts were to have a bird laser cut in paper but after seeing the machine in action I decided to use plywood instead, as it something I couldn’t do myself.

The hardest thing was getting the hang of transferring my drawing to a vector file.  Learning new software is always a challenge, though illustrator makes it relatively easy, but that is something I will need to work on if I want to get some more things cut.

So here’s the process

My original drawing.  Its important to make sure the file is as clean and tidy as possible before you import it to illustrator, this saves a lot of time deleting vector lines in illustrator, which is a very time consuming job.

And here’s the image after its been changed to a vector line drawing ready to be cut.

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