mirrorshard | Two Things (Reply)

This is one of the rowan trees along my road; I took a photo, used Gimp to make it clearer & starker, chose a small section of the interlacing branches, and added a frame. Inkscape let me turn it into vector graphics, smoothing off the edges and eliminating speckles and inconvenient bits, and then exporting that as a DXF file let me feed it straight into the London Hackspace laser cutter. That worked to outline the image onto a piece of reclaimed hardwood (skip-dived, though not by me), and then I carved it out with my normal woodcarving tools; the laser lets me use a much more complex design than I've managed in the past.

It's now basically ready to print, or at least if I need to do any more work on it then I won't know until after I've inked it up and pulled a proof.

These are made from 300gsm recycled paper; the design is a vectorised & messed-about-with scan of an actual nettle leaf, from my garden. If you click through to Flickr, there are a lot of WIP images of the leaf in various stages; I'm entirely happy to let any of you have the SVGs if you fancy playing around with them.

I already have a customer for this pair, which makes me extremely happy! I've got two others on my worktable too, and they're quite quick to reify now I have the completed digital file. It may have taken me 8-10 hours of vector art to get the design right, but now I can just print off a dozen pairs, get out the scalpel, and apply a few layers of ink & glue. It's an interesting inversion of the printmaking technique, and it makes me very happy.