As mentioned previously, I’ve declared that one of my creative goals for 2024 is to create at least 52 AI assisted/inspired artworks this year, using AI-generated images as a prompt for actual physical creative pieces. My most recent piece is a Yorkshire Rose card.
Using ChatGPT’s DALL-E, I gave it a prompt:
Please try to create a papercut greetings card of a Yorkshire Rose.
This is what it came up with on the first attempt:
As usual, my first reaction was “WOW”. But then my follow-up reaction was the realisation that:
1) these designs wouldn’t be very easy to recreate as physical objects, and
2) they were just white roses, rather than actual Yorkshire roses.
…so I had to try to teach DALL-E what a Yorkshire Rose was:
Thanks – those are lovely but they are just white roses rather than specifically Yorkshire roses. The Yorkshire rose is a traditional emblem of Yorkshire in the UK. It is usually shown as having 5 white inner petals and 5 white outer petals – usually with leaves in between the 5 outer petals. It is similar to a Tudor rose, but with all-white petals instead of some petals being red.
Here are the results:
Now we were getting somewhere! For some reason I wanted to create a card that actually said “Yorkshire” on it. So I asked DALL-E to include “Yorkshire” under the rose emblem. This fifth attempt was OK, but again would have been difficult to directly create as a physical card…
…but the sixth attempt was excellent (with – of course – the exception being that DALL-E mis-spelled the only word I’d asked it to include):
Bingo! I instantly loved this design, but there was still a lot of work to do before I could cut it out:
Obviously I needed to correct the spelling.
Some areas wouldn’t work as papercuts because they weren’t attached to any other parts of the card, so I needed to adapt them.
Because of the shadows in the image, I would need to create the image as several layers.
Creating the physical design
This time I opened the Linearity Curve image software, and drew lines around the elements of the design so I could create an SVG file to cut with my laser cutter. I cut it with the laser because I thought I might not be accurate enough if I did it by hand.
Here is the original image on the left, with my physical version of the card on the right:
How well did DALL-E follow my prompts?
As mentioned above, the AI image generator initially didn’t know what a Yorkshire Rose was. However, once I’d explained the concept it did an amazing job… although then it let itself down again by mis-spelling a specific word. The papercut element was great, though. So on the whole I’ll give DALL-E 8/10.
How close is the physical version to the original AI design?
I’m going to give myself 83%. The differences are:
I changed “YORKSHHIRE” to “YORKSHIRE”
I had to link some of the ‘orphaned’ design elements to other parts of the design so that they wouldn’t fall out when I cut them.
I couldn’t get the shadows/lighting the same as in the original image. (Some of the shadows seem difficult/impossible to achieve in the physical version, so I didn’t make too much of an effort trying to get them exactly right.)
To get the right-looking thickness of paper I had to use watercolour card rather than paper, but that’s got a bit more of a creamy colour than the bright paper of the original image.
The laser made brown marks on the edges of the card, so again I haven’t been able to match the brightness of the original image.
Elements where I just left the AI design and didn’t make any changes:
The shapes of the leaves and the rose.
The shapes of the individual letters.
Lessons learned
When making a layered papercut, even if the pieces have already been cut out by laser it can still take a long time to position the pieces correctly so they can be glued into place.
(Solution to point (1) above:) If it’s tricky to position the layers of designs on top of each other, etch the positions onto the backs of the other paper pieces. For example, I etched the outline of the leafy piece onto the back of the large rose piece. This made it much quicker to accurately glue the leaves into place.
Things I still need to learn or improve
Is there a quicker way to automatically (but accurately) convert the JPG image into SVG shapes? I tried to use Curve’s ‘Autotrace’ function, but it wasn’t very accurate so I decided to draw around most of the shapes by hand (using an Apple pencil).
If I get chance later, I might try to match the shadows more accurately, and maybe also try to cut from a thinner, whiter paper or card.
Homework:
Create a specific Barnsley version of the card/artwork.
Create a version with no text.
Try to cut from thinner, whiter paper/card.
Thanks for reading this post. If you’ve got any suggestions of prompts or projects – or if you’ve been experimenting yourself with AI-assisted images – I’d love to hear about them. You can either comment below or send me a message via the Contact form.
Continuing with my ongoing project of “An AI made me do it”, this latest mission was a great excuse to use AI to generate an image that I could then turn into a physical object. I needed a birthday card for my dad, and I wondered if AI would be able to help me. Normally I like to do papercut cards for family and friends, so this project became “Papercut birthday card for my dad”.
I logged into ChatGPT/DALL-E, and gave it the prompt:
As a first attempt, I thought this was amazing. DALL-E even added an envelope! I was impressed that most of the design could actually work as a papercut. There were very few isolated elements that would fall out if they were cut exactly as shown. However, there was a confusing section near the middle of the design where two elements were layered together (the snail or spiral on top of a flower shape).
At the same time, DALL-E also created this card…:
…which I would have immediately tried to cut out – if only it didn’t very clearly say “THUD” right in the middle. What on earth?!
So having discovered that DALL-E knew what a papercut birthday card looked like, I gave it another prompt:
“Great! Please could you include some little light aircraft in the image?”
At first sight these were amazing again, but:
they both had non-standard spellings of “Birthday”,
The left card was almost impossible to turn into a card without a lot of work,
Most of the planes didn’t look feasible as 2D paper objects.
Try, try again…
As usual, just when I thought that the AI was going to produce a fantastic result with the next image, we ended up having a fight instead. It either mis-spelled words (including “Dad”!), or presented the image at a sloping distorted angle, or came up with a design that would be impractical as a papercut.
Also as usual, the designs were nearly right, not really right. Here are some of the rejects:
In the end I just had to pick one that looked possible to cut without many adjustments:
I printed it out on a normal piece of printer paper, then used that printout as a cutting template.
Here is the hand-cut version that I produced first:
…but then I continued to work on a laser-cut version. To do that I used Linearity Curve, which has an ‘auto trace’ function. Auto trace converts JPG files (i.e. photos) into vector graphics (i.e. collections of flat shapes). Auto trace sometimes makes little errors with the shapes (but is still way faster than tracing around the images by hand), so afterwards I edited the nodes of the vector shapes to try to get them to match the original image a bit better:
(The little white dots on the plane are nodes that can be moved around.)
…and here is the physical laser-cut version (on the right), next to the original AI design:
How well did the AI follow my prompts?
I would say about 8/10, for this project. Very successful! Most of the designs looked like papercut birthday cards. And all of them (when requested) contained light aircraft. However – as mentioned several times before in this ongoing series of projects – creative spelling was the opposite of useful or helpful.
How close is the physical version to the original AI design?
I’m going to say it’s about 85%. The differences are:
I didn’t cut out all of the sections that were cut out in the original design – I just etched them instead.
I changed the tail section because if I’d cut it out then lots of the pieces would just have dropped out. (Also, the stripe extends forward from the tail, which doesn’t look quite right.)
Some of the swirly bits have been simplified.
I couldn’t find any dark green card or paper to mount the plane on, so I chose a speckled dark blue piece instead.
The letters in the “Happy Birthday” banner had to be converted into stencil-type letters (otherwise the central sections of the As, Ps, B, D and R would have dropped out).
The elements where I just left the AI design and didn’t make any changes:
The outline of the plane
The design of the banners.
Lessons learned
ChatGPT is great at papercut birthday card designs.
Things I still need to learn or improve
Actually I’m pretty pleased with this project. Even the ‘duds’ had lots of elements in them that I felt could be used in future projects.
Homework:
Convert at least three of the AI’s original designs into actual cards.
Thanks for reading this post. If you’ve got any suggestions of prompts – or if you’ve been experimenting yourself with AI-generated images – I’d love to hear about them. You can either comment below or send me a message via the Contact form.
Throughout 2023 there was a load of hooha around AI (artificial intelligence) in the news and online. Many writers, artists and makers seemed to be lining up to say how awful it was, but I felt pretty open-minded about it. I was persuaded by the opinions of people like Joanna Penn from the Creative Penn podcast, who basically said she viewed it as a tool that could work as an “amplifier of human imagination” (as opposed to a replacement for it), but that as with any tool – e.g. the printing press, cameras, the internet – that tool could be used by people in either negative or positive ways.
I was particularly interested in the mention of text-to-image generators, because it appealed to all of the different versions of ‘me’: the me with an MSc in computing, the me with an MA in creative and critical writing, the me with an accidental MRes in education, and the overall me who loves learning and making new things.
So at the very end of 2023 when my Christmas craft rush was over, I thought I would have a play with some AI image generators to see if they might be useful in my own artwork…
…and it was FUN!
This is the first ever AI-generated image that I produced, using Adobe Firefly: [oh by the way, the links on this page are all just for information – none of them are affiliate links and I’m not sponsored by any products]
I was completely blown away. I’d used the prompt “Letter ‘K’ with doodle flower art, output as a vector image for a papercutting design“, and it came out looking like one of my own sketchbook doodles – only better.
AI disappointments
However, I discovered that even though Firefly has a specific theme of ‘Vector look’, I couldn’t find a way to get it to actually generate SVG/vector images. Maybe this will change in future, but at the moment (January 2024) it looks like Firefly can’t generate vectors so you have to use Adobe Illustrator instead. I did start a free trial of Illustrator, but (1) it was really stingy with the number of images that could be generated, (2) the images were so rubbish that I never even bothered saving any, let alone using them, and (3) considering those first two points, I couldn’t justify going ahead with a paid subscription when the package didn’t do what I needed it to do.
Having tested Firefly and Illustrator, I thought I’d try out another AI image generator. After a Google search trying to find an image generator that could output vector graphics, I discovered Kittl. Like Firefly, it produced some really interesting initial results for me…
…but like Firefly, it had some drawbacks. Again, everything may have changed by the time you read this, but at the moment Kittl seems to be unable to reliably create anything with letters or words in it.
For example, can you guess what letters these are below? “X”? “B”?:
Nope – they’re both the letter K, according to Kittl. Sigh. Back to the drawing board (literally).
AI Wins
So I went back to Firefly to see if it could handle letters any better than Kittl. It could (mostly). Here’s what I got with the prompt “Large serif letter ‘J’ decorated with waves” I really liked it – even though the decoration looks more like a feather than waves:
I saved the image, loaded it into some software that can convert images to SVG files (“Curve“), and then tweaked the image a bit.
And so I created my first-ever piece of AI-assisted laser art. Because after editing parts of the SVG file, I etched the J onto a “scribbles that matter” bullet journal for my sister, and gave it to her for Christmas.
Instead of taking hours to create, it took 10 seconds to generate the initial image, then about half an hour of tweaking the vector file. I am now thinking that AI will supercharge my creativity and artistic output, because…
AI-assisted designs versus my traditional method
Let’s compare the AI-assisted process to my usual method of creating a design:
With my traditional method, first I round up lots of reference images (from books, my own photos, and/or other media like Creative Commons images, licenced images, and images that are in the public domain.) With all of these images I then begin to ‘synthesise’ elements and shapes in my sketchbook – i.e. combine them into what feels to me like a summary of the images.
[IOU a screenshot of my digital sketchbook here, but in the meantime just imagine a load of seagulls in different positions and from different angles]
The eventual design is therefore an original artwork that references all of those other images, but doesn’t copy them. What I’m aiming for is to try to get to the concentrated “essence” of a shape. So from the images above I am attempting to create the most seagull-y seagull possible. I want people to look at the image and instantly think, “Yep, that’s a seagull”. It should be a design that represents a seagull. It’s not one specific seagull that really exists in the world, but rather an amalgamation of many examples which make up the seagully-est design I can manage.
Example of the final seagull on a fridge magnet, which I’ve been selling via some small shops and galleries:
The whole process often takes between two and five days (I tend to take longer for historic buildings than I do for animals). This is fine for products that I will be able to sell in large quantities, because the cost of my time will eventually be repaid – albeit in very small chunks – e.g. a fraction per sale from each fridge magnet or Christmas bauble. And that time is also OK for pieces that I make for family or friends, because I’m creating the items purely for their (and my) enjoyment.
But what happens if someone wants to commission a piece of unique artwork from me? If it takes me a day to design and make, then I’ll probably have to charge over £100, which would put my work out of reach of most people. Plus I’m also not currently well-known enough as an artist to attract many of those customers anyway.
The way that papercutting artists usually get round this pricing problem is to spend time creating a template, which has the same overall design but key parts of it can be customised. For example, my Christmas baubles share the same filigree designs, but can then be adapted to include individual names inside them:
What I would really love is to create a completely unique item for each person, but for the process to only take me about an hour instead of a couple of days…
AI Aid
…That’s where the AI comes in.
Remember the “artistic synthesis” stage above, when I created the most seagull-y seagull that I could manage but it took me two or three days? This is where AI might be able to revolutionise my design process.
AI engines are basically able to follow the same process as me, but in about ten seconds instead of ten hours. They can access thousands of images of seagulls, compare them to each other, and come up with their own version of a seagull based on the similarities in the images. Great!
Or is it?
Unfortunately, the AI doesn’t actually know what it’s doing. If it produces an image that is pleasing to humans, that’s probably pretty much by accident. It may have come to a similar output design as mine, but it’s done it through brute force and ignorance rather than by artistic judgement. Probably the only reason it has come up with a human-pleasing design is that humans tend to only upload/share images that they actually find attractive in the first place, so those are the inputs on which the AI is basing its outputs.
My theory is based on experiences during the last couple of weeks. I’ve learned that AI image generators are capable of producing some nice-looking images, but that they make errors that no human would ever make. For example, the images below show that the Kittl AI came up with some recognisable designs of ballerinas…but they featured anything between 0 and 4 legs. I would suggest that four out of those five options represent a non-standard number of legs:
And since when do ballerinas wear stilletos?! Similarly, in the last two weeks I’ve seen an awful lot of 2-tailed cats, plus a 14-fingered woman (6 on one hand and 8 on the other, just for info).
Yes, but is it really ART?
This is not a new debate. Marcel Duchamp famously sparked outrage with his 1917 “sculpture” piece called Fountain. (It wasn’t a fountain – it was a mass-produced urinal.) And heck, is photography really art? Over 100 years after these questions originally surfaced we are still basically asking the same questions about art and/or artists. Can Andy Warhol be considered the creator of all of his Factory of artworks? (check out Tim Harford’s Cautionary Tales podcast episode for a good discussion about Warhol’s work.)
I think for most people there is a sliding scale of what counts as an “artwork” or an “artist”, and what counts as “original”, “influenced by”, “derivative”, “pastiche”, or “blatantly plagiarised”. It’s often a very personal decision, depending partly on the intent and skill of the artist, and partly on the interpretation of the beholder. Billions of digital photographs are taken every year, but surely only a tiny percentage of those photos are intended/interpreted as art, even though they may have all been created using the same basic equipment.
AI generated art versus AI assisted art
I personally am convinced that the images that AIs come up with are at least original. Every human artist has been influenced by other artists or artistic movements – whether consciously or not – so as long as the elements of the AI reference images have been legally obtained and have genuinely been influenced rather than directly copied then the method of creation seems OK. If it’s good enough for humans, it’s good enough for AI.
But for me, there is a difference between AI generated pieces and AI assisted pieces. Thanks again to Joanna Penn of the Creative Penn podcast for bringing up this distinction. AI can produce some fantastic images, based on prompts by humans. Do we call those humans “artists”, though? At the moment I’m leaning toward saying yes, because I can think of established artists who already use pre-existing objects in their artworks. One of my favourite artists is Andy Goldsworthy, whose work has included ice, leaves, rocks, branches, twigs. When I think about the processes that he must go through in order to get from the start to the finish of an artwork, I could argue that they are vaguely similar processes to those of people who work with text-to-image generators. They have to come up with an idea or prompt in the first place, but then (if my experiments so far are anything to go by) the artists may have to discard tens or even hundreds of the generated images in order to end up with just the one “right” image. I’d bet that Andy Goldsworthy doesn’t use every leaf or rock or ice shard that he sees while he’s creating his artworks, and that he carefully selects exactly the right objects for exactly the right positions. And I can’t remember who originally declared it, but don’t many photographers say that the secret of being a good photographer is to discard all of the bad photos? The perceived artistry therefore comes partly through the ideas and decisions that the humans have made during the production and/or presentation of their works.
That makes a lot of sense to me, so I’m satisfied that people who use unedited AI-generated art do have some claim to being creators of art.
However with my own work I’d like to go one or two steps further than just churning out images that have been made for me by a computer. For a start, I rarely get a result that looks perfect to me. Nearly all of them have some element that either looks plain wrong (three-legged ballerina, anyone?!), or maybe doesn’t fit well with the rest of the image, or doesn’t match the prompt words. Therefore I almost always have to change the prompts, and to find ways to edit the images to make them fit my notion of “good”.
After that I’ll convert the image into an SVG file and then edit that file for another hour or two. Finally, I’d like to actually turn the image into some kind of physical item (e.g. like the “J” bullet journal above). Maybe more about those additional stages in a later post, but for now I’m just happy to report that because of the stages my work goes through, I regard my recent experiments as being AI assisted rather than AI generated. An awful lot of me will be going into the final pieces, and the main difference between these artworks and my usual ones is that a lot of the time-consuming “synthesis” stage has been speeded up for me by the use of an AI tool. I feel like it’s the equivalent of Andy Goldsworthy taking a team of assistants with him when he’s going to make a leaf-based art installation, and saying to each of them “Bring me a bucket of orange and yellow autumn leaves that don’t have any bits of green in them”. He would still be creating the actual artwork, but would also be saving himself some time. I guess it’s also like painters buying their paints from shops, instead of grinding and mixing the colours themselves.
This is only the very beginning of my adventures with AI-generated artwork, and I’m hoping to explore them a lot more during the rest of 2024. I know it’s still a very contentious issue with a lot of people, but for me, for now, it’s FUN. I think that as long as I’m honest about my creative processes then it should be up to me to use whatever tools I want. Just as I wouldn’t try to pass off my laser-cut artworks as being cut by hand, I won’t be telling people that my pieces aren’t influenced by an AI if they actually are. On the other hand though, if I’ve spent a lifetime enjoying Art Nouveau and Celtic knotwork, I don’t think I should be expected to calculate what percentage of each of my artworks has been influenced by those genres if my pieces somehow all end up with flowers or sinuous lines in them.
Creative goals for 2024:
Bearing all of the above in mind, I really do want to continue exploring AI text-to-image generators, and to see where they might lead my work. Therefore here is a ‘goal declaration’ for 2024:
My creative goal for this year is to create at least 52 AI-assisted physical artworks.
I have no idea what they will be yet, but off the top of my head I can think of jewellery, coasters, decorated boxes, wall hangings, gifts, and adult-colouring-page cards. I’m really excited about this challenge and think I’ll learn a lot from it (and hopefully produce some interesting art along the way).
In the meantime if anyone else is having fun with AI generated images but doesn’t have their own laser cutter, I’m happy to discuss possible suggestions or commissions 😉
This is the most recent wedding papercut that I’ve created.
I did originally create a design that just used the initial letters of the two people, but the trouble with couples who have the initials of “N” and “O” is that it looks like the artwork is spelling out “NO”. Which isn’t a very auspicious message for a wedding gift. So I decided to spell out their names in full, after all.
First I tried cutting the piece with my lasercutter, but the result wasn’t as good as I’d hoped for. The laser-cut edges of the designs were just a bit too brown and toasted. So I cut the design by hand instead, to ensure that the edges of the paper stayed their original colour. Then I framed the piece in a “shadow box” frame. (It’s taken me years of experimenting and searching, to finally find the right type of frame for this type of papercut. Would you like a tutorial article on how to frame papercuts like this? If so, please let me know via the comments section or the Contact page. )
Creating the design
The leafy/berry-y elements of the wedding papercut design came from an SVG file that I bought from Vectorstock.com. I’ve mentioned Vectorstock here before, but basically the idea is that to save time, you don’t want always to draw a completely new design from scratch – especially if someone else has already created a lovely design to begin with. Buying an expanded licence allows other artists to buy the SVG file and then sell their own artworks, based on that design. With this system the original artist gets a payment from other artists who want to use their design, the customer-artist gets to save time when creating their own artworks, and the customer-artist’s own customer gets an artwork that is totally unique but is usually a lower price than if the papercutting artist designed every single element of the design from scratch . Win/win/win!
I’ve been a bit busy with my PhD recently, so have put all of my online shops into ‘holiday mode’ in order to devote more time to studying. But I do still accept occasional word-of-mouth orders from friends and family and existing customers. This week I made a laser cut family tree design for a friend:
This is one of my favourites – I particularly like the pattern of the woodgrain on this one.
And it’s always a good sign when you can read the names even as a tiny thumbnail-sized image. It usually means that in the real-life version, the design will be readable from across any room where the piece is hanging or standing. For the more recent designs I’ve been getting into the habit of leaving a lot more space around the letters than before, and the ‘less is more’ approach means that the names do seem to stand out a lot better.
Despite being raaaather busy (or maybe because of it?!) I also accidentally got sucked into dabbling with Instagram this week, so have now properly activated my account and have put this ‘Doreen’ family tree image on my account (@LaserSister). So if Instagram is your thing, please do have a poke around my images and say hi over there (once I upload some more content onto it!)
Right, must go and do some more studying. But in the meantime if you have urgent need of a unique personalised family tree, feel free to contact me or to check on the ‘Shop‘ tab at the top of this page to see if any of my online stores are up and running at the moment.
Here is a lasercut sugar skull pendant – Happy Halloween!
OK, sugar skulls are traditionally more of a ‘Day of the Dead‘ thing than Halloween, but what the heck 🙂
Lasercutters: Can’t be bothered to design your own sugar skull? Why not buy a licence to use someone else’s design? (That link above is to a post I wrote a while ago, about why and how you can fast-forward your lasercutting business by using stock images and designs.)
That’s actually what I did in this case. The design is brilliant and so detailed, and etches really well – so why re-invent the wheel? I bought the extended licence and now I am able to cut and sell this design in my own business. As well as Halloween lasercut sugar skull pendants and earrings, I’m also hoping to adapt it into a papercut version. That might take a while though. Maybe by next Halloween…
I got this particular sugar skull design from Vectorstock (that’s an affiliate link, by the way. Not that I’ve yet made any money from any of my affiliate links, but they are only a minor part of this blog – I just enjoy sharing (and discovering) lasercutting skills and news!)
The best thing about clear acrylic jewellery is that it goes with anything! It’s like wearing a chameleon. Hmm. I might make one of those, one day…
What is a “sprue”, and why should I use sprues with my lasercutting designs?
(This is another article in “Money-Saving Lasercutting Tips” – a free tutorial series that demonstrates effective and efficient lasercutting techniques. Tip #3 is all about those awful moments when you watch your precision-cut laser pieces drop down into the guts of the machine … and how to avoid those moments in future.)
Definition of a sprue
Sprues are most commonly seen in injection-moulded plastic toys. For a fuller description check out the Wikipedia definition, but briefly:
In the image below, there are little links that connect the plastic toy components to the frame. These are the sprues. They are created as part of the moulding process, but the useful secondary function of sprues is that they hold the components securely in position within the plastic frame, until you twist or cut the components out. So below, the pieces stay safely in place until the user needs them, rather than rattling around in a box or falling on the floor and getting lost.
Why do I need to use sprues when I’m cutting with a laser?
In laser cutting projects, you often need to cut light materials such as paper or card. But because the machines often blow and/or suck air during the cutting process, it’s very easy for a lovely piece of personalised wedding card to just fly away while you look on in horror.
It’s also really common to need to cut very small pieces from plastic or wood. But if they are smaller than the holes in the cutting bed of the laser machine, the pieces often fall through the holes as they have been cut. Then you either have to fish the pieces out of the cutting bed, or cut them again. This can potentially be a big waste of time and money.
Oh no! Where have three of my little circles gone?
This will happen to all lasercutter users at least once, but not everyone knows what to do to avoid it.
It might seem like it doesn’t matter very much because they are only tiny pieces and you can always cut more of them. But in the example image above I have lost 75% of my pieces. And what started out as a cutting job of only a few seconds, has now turned into either a search-and-rescue mission to retrieve the three little circles, or a waste of more time and material because I need to cut more pieces.
So we therefore need a way to cut the pieces that automatically stops them falling down or blowing away.
One solution is to use sprues, and to include them in the cutting design right from the start.
When to Use Sprues
Generally speaking, use sprues if the piece to be cut is less than 1cm squared, and anytime you are cutting a design from a piece of paper.
How to Design Sprues
You can create sprues very quickly and easily in most vector-based drawing software (e.g. Photoshop or CorelDraw). I happen to use CorelDraw, but the principles are the same for most other apps/programs.
For most lasercutting projects, a sprue is just going to be a small break in the cutting line. It should be:
Big enough that the cut piece remains connected to the paper/wood/plastic
Small enough that the cut piece can be pulled or pushed out of the sheet of paper/wood/plastic by hand
There are two main ways to create them. The first is to ‘manually’ make a tiny break in the cutting line, and the second is to use the Weld function to make the break.
Method 1: Make a ‘manual’ break in the cutting line
Step 1) Make sure that you can edit curves and manipulate/add nodes on the cutting path of the design. (In CorelDraw the “Shape Tool” lets you do this.)
Note: If you can’t see any nodes to edit, you may need to convert the shape to curves first (e.g. by right-clicking the mouse and selecting “Convert to Curves”):
2) Zoom in really close to the object (e.g. so that a 3mm line fills the whole screen), then add two new nodes as close to an existing node as you can manage:
3): Select the middle node of the group of three nodes, then break the path of the curve. (e.g. by right-clicking and choosing “Break Apart”):
Screenshot from CorelDraw: breaking a curve
4) That middle node should have broken in two, so take one of the two resulting nodes and drag it about half a millimetre outside the curve. Then do the same for the other new node. This creates a small break in the cutting line, so that when you cut the piece it should now remain fixed in place until you’re ready to push or tear it from the material you were cutting.
Screenshot from CorelDraw with broken curve zoomed in
Screenshot of object with sprue at the top
5) Use the laser cutter to cut out the shape.
The object can now be pushed or pulled out of the sheet of material that it was cut from.
(You may need a knife or scissors to help cut it free, and a file or blade to cut off any extra material left over.)
Extra material at the top of the flower can be cut off with scissors
Conclusion
Using sprues helps laser cutters to save time, money, and annoyance. Instead of wailing in anguish as you watch another tiny precision-cut object fly away or disappear down a hole, consider using this little ‘design hack’ to avoid those problems.
Basically, whenever you’re lasercutting and you think “tiny” or “paper”, you should also think, “use sprues!”
I hope you found this article useful.
Method 2 (using the ‘Weld’ function to create sprues) is coming up later, but in the meantime if you have any comments or questions, please feel free to share them in the comments section or via the contact form.
It’s a PDF file, which should work with most lasercutting systems. However if you need an EPS or SVG file, I’ve also put free versions on Vectorstock.com.
(Please click on the image or the button below to download it.)
If you prefer SVG files or other formats, I’ve uploaded the free sample files to Vectorstock.com for convenient downloads. (Try searching for “free lasercutting files bonus shapes”
Money-saving lasercutting tips #2: How to make “money for nothing” from scrap materials
(This is part of a series of money-saving tips for lasercutting businesses and enthusiasts.) The previous article discussed why you should use your leftover sheets of lasercutting material. This follow-up article delves a bit more deeply into how you can use these scrap pieces more economically, and potentially make ‘money for nothing’ by inserting bonus shapes between the main shapes that you are going to cut. It includes a link to a free lasercutting vector file that contains examples of these bonus shapes.
(If you don’t want to bother reading the article you can just click the button below. It should link straight to the free lasercutting file of sample ‘bonus’ shapes. (If the link is broken, please let me know, so I can fix it again.)
In the current ‘austerity’ economy there is always an interest in make-do-and-mend activities. At the moment even the BBC are running aprogramme calledMoney for Nothing. In this programme, dustbin-diving cheapskates thrifty people find old objects and then take them to artists and craftspeople who then convert the items into something beautiful and/or useful.*
The tips below follow that notion, and demonstrate how you can hopefully turn some of your scrap materials into cash.
Getting more value from your lasercutter
Artists and crafters are rarely well-paid, and so always try to get the most value out of materials as possible. This article shows how to avoid the feelings of frustration and guilt that can come with wasting materials … by using the leftover lasercutting materials to potentially gain some extra money. Win/win!
And as mentioned above, there is a free lasercutting vector file (PDF, SVG, or EPS) available. The file contains examples of extra items that can be inserted in between the main items you are cutting. That way you can use even very small sections of wood or acrylic to make useful products.
The idea is that your time is used more efficiently by cutting out (potentially) useful items straight away, rather than saving small weirdly-shaped bits of wood ‘just in case’.
And because you have used the scrap wood to cut out these (hopefully) useful items, your subconscious won’t give you a constant guilt-trip about wasting materials. So you can get on with doing other, more important lasercutting jobs instead.
Designing your own ‘bonus’ shapes
Below is a link to a free lasercutting vector file. It contains examples of popular shapes that can be used immediately. As mentioned in the previous article, I use this type of ‘bonus’/filler object all the time. When cutting family trees for example, these use large sections of wooden sheet – which then leave funny-shaped scrap pieces…
There’s plenty of space either side of the trunk to cut other objects!
…so rather than waste the leftover wood, I use my ready-made ‘bonus’ shapes to fill in the gaps. Shapes like numbers, letters, and hearts are always popular with other crafters, and so I might cut out a set of hearts and put them on Ebay or Etsy or Folksy. That way, the expensive lasercutting wood sheet material is then used to its full potential.
Have a think about items that you might be able to sell to other crafters, for example. Acrylic letters and numbers to use as card toppers? Little wooden hearts to use as table confetti or jewellery? Different sizes of circles that could be used by toymakers?
Conclusion
By having a file of pre-made popular designs, you can use your leftover wood/acrylic to potentially generate extra income. Instead of keeping weird little bits of wood ‘just in case’, you can make an immediate decision about what to do with the scrap wood, so that you produce far less waste and far more profit.
Challenge: think about small objects that might be useful to other crafters (or even to yourself) in future, and create a file of those shapes. Then the next time you do a cutting job that leaves gaps between the main objects, insert some of the ‘bonus’ shapes into those gaps and cut them out as you go along.
In the meantime, here is a link to a free file which contains examples of some of those bonus shapes:
Free lasercutting file
I hope you found this article useful. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to share them in the comments section or via the contact form.
*Fellow Guild of Makers member Bad Dog Designs has had several pieces featured on the “Money for Nothing” programme. Check out his amazing ‘nixie clocks‘, made from objects such as old radios and record players.
Laser cutting materials such as wood veneers or acrylic sheets are often really expensive. Here are some money-saving laser cutting tips that will help to get the most out of your materials, and should also save time as well as money…
(Note: some of my blog posts contain affiliate links. If you’d like to know more about these, please check out my “policies” page.)
Tip #1: Fill in the gaps!
The other day Kitronik kindly sent me some samples of wood and acrylic…
…so I decided to test the acrylic by making some pink sparkly unicorns (obvs).
I found the designs on Vectorstock.com then downloaded them and laid them out ready to cut:
BUT I didn’t cut them out immediately. I knew there was a way I could get even more value out of that one small square of acrylic.
When doing any cutting job that involves irregular shapes, there will always be spaces in between the objects. So once you’ve cut out the main objects, what do you do with the acrylic/wood/card/paper/etc. sheet that is left behind? There are three main options:
Option 1: Throw it away (or send it for recycling, if it’s the right type of material).
The main advantage is that you get a tidier workspace.
But my reaction to this option is:
Noooooooooo!
Because there is still enough of the remaining wood/acrylic/whatever to cut other objects from. So you could save yourself some money by using those scraps of material.
Option 2: Keep it (because you don’t want to waste material that you could still cut from).
In the example image above, there are quite a few gaps between the unicorns. So there is enough acrylic sheet left over that could be used to cut other small objects. Theoretically then, the advantage of this option is that you don’t have to cut the small items from a new sheet of acrylic – you can just use the gaps in the leftover piece of material instead.
This is what I used to do. Keep the leftover materials for later. But my answer to this now is also:
Noooooooooo!
No matter how organised you are, it is highly unlikely that you will ever go back and use those little spaces in the leftover wood or acrylic.
Because whatever shape you cut out next will need to fit onto a very weird shape of material. You might know that you want to cut out a circle that has a diameter of 20mm, but until you open the old cutting file for the previous job (e.g. sparkly pink acrylic unicorns), you’ll have no idea what the dimensions are of the leftover wood/acrylic from that previous job.
In the image below, the red circle does fit on the leftover sheet because it has a diameter of 20mm. But if it had a diameter of 30mm then it wouldn’t have fit:
…and the only way to find that out is to open the original cutting file (or find the piece of leftover material itself) and measure the gaps. This also assumes that you keep all of your cutting files, and that you can match them up to the exact piece of leftover material that is stored in some ‘leftover purgatory’ pile in your workshop somewhere like this:
scrap graveyard
So let’s just face it – it is almost certain that you will never use that piece of material again, once you’ve finished your initial cutting job. It’s always easier just to start from a fresh new piece of cutting material, because you know exactly how big that piece is, and you don’t have to worry about fitting your new piece around some oddly-shaped object that has already been cut out of the sheet.
It reminds me of when my husband was helping his mother to clear out her attic. He swore that he had found a box up there labelled “pieces of string too short to save”.
It may also be a false economy to hunt down the piece of scrap to cut the new object from. Finding the correct computer file and/or piece of physical scrap material might take several minutes, whereas cutting from a fresh sheet of material will be much quicker.
However, you may still hate waste (of both resources and time) and want to make the most of your material. In this case there is still a third option available. This is what I tend to do nowadays instead of the two options above:
Option 3: Fill in the gaps
This is a good compromise. It lets you cut your ‘main’ objects (unicorns, in this case), but also make something useful with the leftover material.
I suggest keeping a separate file of ‘gap-filling objects’, ready for you to copy and paste into your other projects. Heart shapes always come in handy for crafters. Letters and numbers are also very popular.
The screenshot below shows the solution in action.
First I inserted the outlines of the unicorns, and experimented with fitting as many of them onto the little square of material as I could.
Then I copied and pasted the letter “M” and some hearts into the document, to fill in the gaps.
Finally I inserted some tiny circles (bottom right-ish). The sparkly acrylic was a completely new material that I was testing, and so I needed to cut out a few small shapes first in order to find the correct speed and power settings for the laser cutter.
unicorn sampler with extra shapes for economy
As a result, from one little square of acrylic that was less than 10cm x 10cm, I managed to cut out:
3 sparkly pink unicorns
8 sparkly pink hearts
1 sparkly pink letter
The result was that (1) the new material was thoroughly tested, (2) I didn’t have to store a piece of nearly-useless acrylic sheet in my superShed, and (3) I ended up with a few bonus items that could possibly be sold or given away later, and (4) even if I ended up discarding the bonus shapes later on, I wouldn’t feel too guilty because they were basically cut from scrap material in the first place.
Additional tip:
Don’t spend too long worrying about what the ‘filler’ shapes should be. Remember that the point is to turn the laserable material into something more useful (or better still, more sell-able), than the material which would have just gone to waste otherwise.
Conclusion
This is a really fast and efficient way to get the most value out of your laser cutting materials. It solves the problems of waste and guilt, and saves time as well as money. If you are running (or considering running) a laser cutting business then it’s definitely worth trying this option.
I hope you found this article useful. If you do have any questions or comments (or more money-saving laser cutting tips) then please do get in touch.
