Documentation: Corn on acrylic

These were test prints on scrap acrylic. They caught the supervisor's eye in my cross-group crit a couple of weeks ago, and were passed around, with some surprisingly positive feedback.

In terms of colour, I think the print above is the most successful: opaque white on translucent black. By comparison the yellow ink in the other two gets lost, but there is enough contrast in the one above to clearly see the image. And there is something noticeably medical about the x-ray on dark tinted acrylic. 

The above is printed on clear acrylic. The sheet was left over from when I did laser-cut honeycomb patterns and prints at the start of the year. At the time this attempt was a hot mess. We quickly realised with this one that it was the wrong type of plastic, hence the melting and burned effect and incompletion. I held onto the remnants, though, in case it might come in handy later in the year - and it did!
I'd been wanting to make a work which draws a comparison between a honeycomb pattern (yellow, geometric, speaks to contemporary discussion about bees - decline in bee population, possible causes eg. pesticides and destruction of natural habitats) and a corn cob (also yellow, geometric, small kernels - the exact same size as a beehive hexagon, speaks to consumerism, modern farming, GMOs, pesticides, etc...) - the two patterns are an aesthetic + conceptual match made in heaven.
The smoky texture also speaks to things like smoking beehives to calm the bees; fire - a sense of danger; the fact that it's just a segment of the cob makes it looks like a bite has been taken out of it, a possible analogy for 'consuming' or destroying the land via monocrops...

If I could do it again it would be printed in black, not yellow.

Documentation: Weeks 7-8

Outcome: 'Decisions'
MDF and acrylic paint, dimensions variable

I still may or may not paint the pieces... Will see what they say in my next crit.

Documentation Weeks 7-8: WIP for 'Decisions'

Some images from the making of 'Decisions':

The box it is based on. I liked the curly 'D' but couldn't find a similar font, so had to draw it using vectors. Ick.

What the file looks like for laser cutting. Red areas for engraving, blue lines for cutting. There is no easy way to delete overlapping lines so that they don't get cut twice over, so laying out the file is the part that takes the most time -  Illustrator notoriously defies all common sense!

The pieces and box, fresh from the laser cutter. The MDF was masked with blue tape before cutting, so that the engraved text could be sealed and painted without bleeding.

A few different tests with colouring the pieces. Left to right: Inked with printmaking ink and a roller (too much bleed); painted in acrylic (too shiny/tacky/sticky); edges filed on the right 2, tried inking using screen printing (no luck), and one successful attempt using thin layers of eco-friendly ink and a roller. I found that it worked better to seal the edges with GAC but not to prime the MDF.

One of the measurements on the box's edge was 1mm off, and this was enough to make me start over! It also bothered me that the wooden box opened on the left side instead of the right. And the sliding lid would sometimes get stuck, so I wanted some angled/tapered edges to guide it into position. In hindsight I also realised 'Colourings' and 'Flavourings' should just be 'Colours' and 'Flavours, so I made another file...

Above: trying to decide on a new lid design

And there we have it. Decisions: Version 2!

It was so exciting to get free (free!) reign of the laser cutter during the EIPW in January. Using it to cut and engrave several hand-drawn honeycomb patterns, I was thrilled to realise that the bed of the laser cutter, too, is honeycomb patterned. How perfect; the connection was too good to be true. A mechanical, man-made structure, and the most efficient pattern is found in nature - the least possible perimeter so that bees use less energy+wax. Common sense creatures.

We also worked out, with a lot of trial and error, which settings could burn into lino - a mechanical linocut! - and I made several little laser engraved and cut-out bee stamps. 

Next time I’ll use the other 3D cutter as it has a ‘stamp’ setting, which gives slanted edges to the engraved parts. (Next time I’ll also have to pay for it, unfortunately!)