Assignment 4: Printing my Pattern

 This assignment is out of order because I haven't finished object building from technical diagrams yet oops. (help)

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth and carefully perusing the printing guides, I have printed my pattern on cherry wood.

Honestly, I'm pretty happy with it! It's not perfect; the exterior decorations aren't quite centred (I have no idea how I didn't notice it), the engraving shades aren't as varied as I'd like, and I wish I'd done more with full cuts (I was a little afraid to mess up the final design), but I'm happy with it. My favourite part of the design, the flowers on the inner circle, came out excellently. It looks pretty professional, and it's a good example of my work. I'm considering going over it again one day and getting it re-cut, because I think it'd be a great example for my portfolio.

I think my greatest challenge with this project was figuring out how to make a design that looks universally "good". My design looked nice on surfaces with a background, but it was difficult to edit it so that it repeated seamlessly with the way Rhino's pattern tool looks.

Creating a design that could be easily cut with the laser cutter was also somewhat difficult to conceptualize. I wanted to have copies of parts of the flower patterns on the corner of the woodcut, but the curves were annoying to fully close, and I was worried that them not closing seamlessly would mess up the design even more. Now that I know more about the process, I'd like to do something more ambitious in the future.

But at the end of the day, I'm still satisfied with the results of my work and the way it turned out. It was worth the trouble.


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