This is the journey of how a young girl created a beautiful butterfly out of water.

On February 23, 2023, I designed a diamond shaped piece of metal with two overlapping ellipses on Adobe Illustrator. Then, I used the water jet cutter to cut out the shape twice out of aluminum. Here is what it looked like right after cutting:

Then, I filed down the edges to make it less sharp.

As you can see from the first picture, there was some weird resin stuff on the aluminum, so I sanded it all off using a relatively low grit sandpaper. Then, to polish it off, I went up higher and higher grit. Here are some pictures after sanding at different grit levels. It’s kind of hard to tell the difference in the pictures, but I swear it got smoother in real life.

Next, I wanted to create a cool pattern on the sides of the butterfly using a vinyl mask. On thenounproject.com, I found a cool looking pattern and overlayed it on top of my existing Illustrator file. I cut it on the vinyl cutter and stuck it on the metal. Here’s what it looked like:

Then, I sandblasted the metal with the vinyl mask on top. Here’s what it looked like right after sandblasting one of the sides:

And this is what it looked like after peeling it off:

As you can see, the part that was masked left the aluminum smooth and shiny, while the other parts were still smooth but matte. I also sandblasted the back of the diamond.

To mark the steps that I used, I wrote on the back with Sharpie. I decided to put a gloss clear coat over it to make sure everything was smooth and the Sharpie wouldn’t fall off, but I put it on a little too soon after writing it so the marker kind of bled, which you can see here.

Next time, I would wait until the marker fully dried to put the clear coat on.

 

Cost Analysis:

Aluminum – 1/4 sheet x $6.47/sheet = $1.62

Vinyl – 0.5×0.5ft x $7.99/12x11ft roll = $0.01

Clear Coat – 1/10 can x $6.19/can = $0.62

Labor – $15 x 5 = $75

Total: $77.25