For this assignment, my first step was to spend about half an hour deciding what I wanted the noun I wanted a picture of to be. After that, I visited The Noun Project and searched for an image of a robot I wanted to make. Most of the robots were not very cute, but then I found this one (shown below) and I immediately loved it very dearly.

My next step was to import the SVG file of this image that I saved from the noun project into Easel.

Once it was in Easel, I decided to put a rectangle around it to cut through the piece of wood, so that the final piece would have a standard size that framed the robot well. I initially found a piece of MDF that seemed to be a very good size, as it was bigger than the 3x3in piece I imagined, and was a good thickness of .75in.

The first one came out exactly like I wanted, and I was very happy with it. After the first one, I tried doing the exact same thing, however with this one, one of the pegs created by the circles in the bottom of the robot snapped off. Additionally, I was trying to use a piece of scrap wood with less clearance than the last piece, and I ended up centering the piece incorrectly, so a part of another carve was on the edge of this piece.

I decided to post-process both pieces and decided that the second piece would be good practice if I had time to create another carve.

Initially, I thought I might paint or stain them, but I ended up really liking the light wood look on the piece, so I began by just sanding the front of the piece’s cuts to reduce the fuzziness the drill bit left over, then I decided to sand the entire piece robot down on the sander to get rid of the oils and more of the fuzzy pieces. I used the imperfect piece first and discovered that the pressure was very tricky to get right due to the peg-like pieces on the front, and I snapped another of that piece’s pegs. After this, I was much more careful and lighthanded with the first piece. After sanding the fronts, I decided to try out rounding off the corners of the imperfect piece. I ended up sanding each edge to a curve bc I really liked the softness it gave the piece, I realized I had to be very careful about being even with the pressure, and then did the same to the first piece. After this, I used a clear enamel coating to seal the piece.

Once the enamel was dried, I realized some of it spotted on the back and sanded the backs down then left them bc I liked the subtle color contrast and one face that had a sharper edge contrasting to the soft edges.

Later on, I ended up with the time and extra MDF to recreate the second piece, and it went a lot more like the first one, so I then had two identical pieces.

Costs:

Sandpaper: 5$

Carvey: 2,500$

MDF:

a 4ft x 8ft x 3/4in piece of MDF costs 40$ (from Home depot)

using 3 3x3in pieces = using 27in^2

( 27in^2 / 4608in^2 ) x 40$ = around .25$

Enamel Coating:

a few coats of the enamel spray (probably around 30 bc of 10 passes per piece) is probably around .50$ as one 15oz can is about 6$