For a first digital skills session, we were expected to use Photoshop, Illustrator and the laser cutter to create a puppet. First I had to physically draw out my puppet design. I decided to do a ballerina and a camel as I wanted to explore how to represent human movement as well as animal.
After drawing and filling in my design with a sharpie, I scanned it in and opened it up in Photoshop and cleaned the image by changing the res to 250, altering the threshold to make it the contrast harsher and then also cleaning up any un-smooth edges with dust and scratch tool. After doing this, I then selected the magical wand tool and selected all the black on the image, in order to create a work path. When making a work path, one has to alter the tolerance. The lower the tolerance, the closer the anchor points are together. As we were planning to use a laser cutter, I did not want the anchor points to be too close together otherwise it would cause lot burning so it had to be between the range of 1.7 and 2.5. I then converted this path to Illustrator.
On Illustrator and I pasted the path onto an A4 canvas and then made the pathway red because red represents to cut and green represents to engrave in laser cutting language. I then created the holes which would be used to link all parts of my puppets together. I decided to do quite small holes because I wanted to put small split pins in to allow for the design to be more intricate. In addition, I then prepared the document to then be sent off to the laser cutter. I found using the laser cutter was really fun and efficient as it was quick and effective. Lastly, I put in the little bobby pins then bobs your uncle you got puppet.
Overall, I found this whole process very educational as it allowed us to be introduced to how to convert things over from Photoshop to Illustrator and also how to then prepare an image to be done on the laser cutter. I had used Illustrator before but I didn't know how to quite interact between these two softwares. I think I will use this technique when doing modelmaking in other projects. Out of both my puppets, I think that the ballerina was the most effective as there was more movement in the body and it allowed for more positions, whereas the camel was harder to then move around because there are so many legs and lack of joints in the body. I guess there is always room to improve!
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