1. Creating the Design
I remembered seeing diamonds that would connect to make a butterfly at the beginning of this semester in one of our ENGI 210 classes. I knew that I wanted to create a similar design, with diamonds that would create a shape when connected to each other.
I decided to take leaf design from the noun project website. I then cut this design in half and placed each half of one end of the diamonds. I also made sure that they created the desired effect when connected to each other when using adobe illustrator.
My diamond’s design on Adobe Illustrator
2. Cutting the metal using the water jet
After creating my design, I got ready to cut it out on a piece of thin steel.
I place a sheet of metal and fastened it with the rubber stoppers. The sheet I chose had a limited amount of space available for my diamonds so I had to fix my design a bit. Initially, the diamonds were not close enough and I did not have enough space to print both of them at the same time.
Before fixing the distance
After I fixed the distance between each diamond
Cutting the sheet with the water jet cutter only took a few minutes. I was a bit worried at first because I thought a lot of bubbles were being produced in the water but everything ended being fine.
The metal sheet I used
Here is what my diamonds looked like right after using the water jet cutter
3. Filing
I noticed the ends of my diamonds were pretty sharp so I had to file them. This didn’t take a lot of time but I thought it was effective.
4. Sand blasting
I then sand blasted my diamonds. It took a while the first time I used it because I was trying to make my metal look as clean as possible. I then decided to pick one of the diamonds up with my hands but i left my finger prints on it so I had to use the sand blaster again.
Here is what my diamonds looked like after the first time I sand blasted them
5. Spray painting
I originally wanted to colour my diamonds yellow or orange because it reminded my more of autumn which was more in theme with my leaf design. I think there wasn’t enough paint in the bottle I used so the paint looked a bit chunky on my metal. I then made it worse by trying to remove the clumps with a piece of tissue.
This is what my diamonds looked like after my first attempt at spray painting them
For some reason I was still hopeful that i could fix my diamonds so I decided to spray paint blue paint over the yellow paint.
As you can see, the texture was far from smooth
I used the sand blaster again to remove all the paint and started over. I tried to find a full spray paint bottle with the closest colour to yellow or orange. This time I tested the paint on a piece of cardboard multiple times before applying it on my metal.
I was also more careful when applying the paint to avoid chunks
6. Vinyl cutting
The final step of this whole process was creating the vinyl sticker and spray painting again.
The first time I created my sticker, I left it on my diamond for too long, which gave the following result:
Here is what the sticker I cut out first looked like
This is what happened when I took off the sticker 🙁
I had to spray paint my metal again to cover the areas that lacked paint. After that, I printed the vinyl stickers again with material that would stick onto the metal better.
I added the stickers to my diamonds and spray painted on top of them
Here is my final product!
Cost Analysis
Thin sheet of steel: $20 (Home depot)
3 spray paint bottles: $6.98 x 3= $20.94 (Walmart)
Labor: 5 x $7.25 = $36.35
Total = $77.19
