There's one more thing I've wanted to try while I still have a little sabbatical breathing room. The laser cutter in the Duderstadt can cut or etch leather and I have an old suede jacket to donate in the spirit of experimentation.
Once again, I'm using an image from BioArt, Inside the Mask, as inspiration for surface treatment of a leather gorget.
I began by tracing half of the gorget shape in Inkscape using the pencil tool, then cleaned it up by deleting stray nodes and simplifying the vectors. Then I repeated and reversed the image so it is a symmetrical shape.
I imported the BioArt image to trace. I reduced the opacity to 50% so my lines are easier to see. Here you can see the edges of the gorget layered on top of the image.
One layer is for cutting, which is mostly the purple parts plus the outer edge. Those vectors will be set at .01pts which is an adjustment I'll make in the fabrication studio as it is too thin to see on my screen. Another layer is for etching, mostly the red parts of the image. I changed a little to fill in the gaps and extend the image motifs.
Etching is indicated by a filled in space or a heavier line, so the completed file appears to be the reverse. Again, I only traced the left side, grouped all the small vectors in the same layer and then copied and flipped them to create the mirror image.
The front is ready to go! I'll also design a simple back and straps to cut from the same recycled leather. I'll post results in part 2 later this month.
