I joined TechShop, a 15,000 square foot Shangri-La for maker geeks located south of San Francisco in Silicon Valley. It has a very impressive array of tools available for members to use from heavy duty sewing machines, to MIG welders, to an Epilog 45 watt laser cutter. On Saturday I took a basic safety and usage class on the laser cutter and tonight I went back to make my 2 of 52 things project.

My idea was to take some nice paper I picked up at an art store and use the Epilog to cut out an intricate jellyfish pattern, then layer the jellyfish over another piece of fancy colored paper. Things didn't turn out that way, but I am pleased with the results.

I started by looking for a creative commons licensed photo of a jellyfish on Flickr. I found several nice ones, but decided to go with this one. The next step was to turn it into a black and white bitmap in Photoshop and alter it until it was what I wanted. An important issue was converting the image from raster to vector graphics. Photoshop is great for raster graphics, but it doesn't do vectors. I have Illustrator for that, but I'm really not that good at Photoshop and I'm utterly lousy at Illustrator. I spent time tracing and erasing tentacles and trying to clean up the edges. After a couple of hours of fooling around I gave up and left it in raster format.

The reason it is important to convert to vector graphics is that I wanted to cut the jellyfish out of paper. Generally speaking, the Epilog machine cuts vector graphics and etches raster graphics. I experimented a bit and found I could essentially cut out a raster image (by burning away large swaths of material) but it as no good for my image since what I really needed was an outline cut.

I etched out a few jellyfish images on paper, but in the end I scrounged around the TechShop facility for some scrap wood and ended up using that as my medium instead. I think it actually looks nicer than the paper would have anyhow.

Total time spent: 2 hours in photoshop, 1.5 hours on the laser machine.