Ideation

The guest speaker that came to class a few days before gave me inspiration to create a piece that involves landscape. I downloaded an image from noun project, created an outline of the picture using Adobe Illustrator, and imported into Easel Inventable.

Milling

Attempt 1: When carving out the shape, the depth setting was off by 0.075 in, which caused a huge problem towards the end as the bit protruding out from the machine was not long enough and the drill ended up touching the wood piece. I had to force stop the drill but it was too late and the drill bit broke.

Attempt 2 & 3: I noticed the depth settings were not right at the beginning, the drill bit was either not touching the wood or cutting too much. I found out that it was because thickness of the wood pieces were not measured to the exact precision and the drill was not auto focused to the exact zero.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Attempt 4: I successfully carved out the first piece with two different depths to create the effect that one mountain is further away in perception than the other. However, when I was carving out the second replica, due to the unevenness of the wood piece, the thickness changed, and the piece did not cut all the way through, which was why I had to use some “external force” to take it out.

Post-processing

I sanded the pieces first with a grade-80, then with a grade-400 to ensure the surface was ultra smooth. Next, I stained it with black, and applied acrylic paint when it was dry to create the sunset-silhouette effect. After everything dried, I applied one last coat of clear coat to add protection. The result is as follows.

Cost:

• Wood
  • I used approximately 12″ of 1×4 wood, along with some scrap wood pieces as the base. Wood costs approximately $15.
• Paint
  • I used approximately 8 square inches of paint, which is approximately $0.50.
• Labor
  • It took me an hour to learn how to use the machine, approximately 30 minutes to set up, 30 minutes for each attempt, and 1.5 hour post-processing. In total, I spent 5 hours on this project. If hourly wage is $15, then the labor cost is $75.
• Total: $90.50