Silhouette Synthesis
For this Art 103 project students used Adobe Photoshop to seamlessly combine two or more unrelated objects into a coherent piece.
I wanted to explore the natural world versus the manmade world. I chose to use the giraffe, chair, and gas mask to make my silhouette (ironically the giraffe is a manmade object).
The giraffe on the left is the product of combining the three images in Adobe Photoshop, changing their colors to black, and erasing areas to add spots, spaces, and lines. The giraffe on the right is the Photoshop giraffe put into Adobe Illustrator (the laser cutter uses Illustrator). For the laser cutter, I found that I needed to eliminate some of the smaller lines and shrink some of the spots that were close to the edges of the neck.
My first two attempts at laser cutting the silhouette resulted in burned edges.
After adjusting the laser settings, I finally got a clean cut for the final silhouette. If I were to redo this project, I would increase the size of the giraffe in order to allow for more details in the gas mask. I would also use spray adhesive because the hot glue caused the black mat board to sit unevenly on top of the white mat board.
Silhouette Synthesis
Sam Dorgan
Black and white mat board, hot glue
