Using the laser cutter

As I had created all of my designs and cut them out by hand previously to practice, I discovered that it would take me a very long time to cut out everything that I needed by hand and I wouldn't be able to get it done in time to a very high professional standard. Because of this I decided to look into ways that I could fix this and decided that trying out a laser cutter would be my best option. I tracked down the laser cutter in uni and got some help from an experienced technician. He told me to make all of the shapes that I wanted cutting out in illustrator and told me the specifications to save all of the lines as. These are some of the the templates that I made for the laser cutter. 

  

When I went to use the laser cutter, I tried out a different things for example I tried putting paper on top of my mount board to reduce the scorching that the laser leaves as it was not my original intention to have scorch marks. The paper technique didn't reduce the scorching much. But I decided after seeing the final cutting that I really liked the effect that the scorching gives as it adds much more character to the overall image and it will hopefully make the final image look slightly aged to fit in more with the time period that the book is set in. Here are a few of the pieces from the laser cutter they are not at all in the final composition, I just arranged them in a random order, I will upload better images of all of my laser cuttings on a different post. 

   Overall I found the laser cutter really helpful and although I was heavily assisted, it seemed quite simple to use. I would love to use this technique in the future as I really enjoyed the process and I can see good potential to make lots of different products with the aid of this technology.