The Heads on Fire Community

Hello everyone! So for our personal projects, we had to relate to the past, present and future. But for my personal project, I decided to make a memorable tribute to my love ones who influenced and inspired me to succeed in life. Coming up with a project that has to be made out of either wood, acrylic, basically any material suited enough for the Fab Lab is kind of hard, especially when you want your project to be a tribute about your love ones and not much about you. But with the examples that Ms. Katie R. (my supervisor) had hung up on the shelves right next to her desk, the idea automatically clicked in my head. I decided to come up with a wood book that has my love ones portraits engraved and a touching description about them and why they inspire and influenced me. This idea came from a piece that a student made in the past which has a portrait of his hero and a description why he chose that person to be his hero. That piece was even more amazing when the portrait and text was engraved on wood. Right on then, I decided to make a book about my love ones out of wood. But how would I piece my wood portraits together as one book? Well, thanks to Fabiola, she had pointed out the spiral notebook. As a result, my project will be a wood spiral book that has engraved portraits of my love ones with descriptions about them. After coming up with the idea for my personal project, I got right onto work.

The first thing I did was to look for photographs of my love ones. After selecting the photos that I want to use as portraits of them, I started to sketch the pictures out as bigger versions. Once the sketches were finish, I painted them with Indian ink so they can look more like vector portraits. The next day, I scan the portraits onto the computer and saved them on my flash drive for future reference. I then edit the portraits in Adobe Photoshop CS3. I also typed the descriptions on the same program that I had edit for the portraits. The hardest part of making this project was that I had to resize all the images the same size so that when they are engraved, they fit to perfect size as a regular book. The next step was opening the final images in Adobe Illustrator CS3 and drawing a boarder around the images so the laser cutter will know where to cut out the image. The problem for me was that the images were not the same sizes so I had to make a separate image of the boarder (for where the laser will cut) and holes for the spiral that I will later put together as one wood spiral book. The machine to make this book is using the Epilog Laser. My project probably took longer than the rest of the other students' project because I had to engrave and cut out six wood pieces which took up to an hour to make but the results was the just the way I wanted.