I dream of…. Laser Cutting

[1/19 My First Brushes With Possibility]

At 10a.m on a Sunday morning after a Detroit Derby Girl's bout day I sat next to her. Covered in the previous night’s sweat, wearing the same clothes I wore to the Northern Lights Lounge after party the night before and looking like a rogue deer staring into the headlights of my own 2002, red escort.

Her name is Sarah Wagner and her art looks like the stuff of half remembered dreams. When she first mentioned the fabric-draped sculptures fashioned from laser cut armatures I was interested, then the clincher: they are see-through. Ladders that symbolize mountains, translucent silk boar heads with arterial insides- if you don’t believe how seriously rad her work is you can check out her website sarahwager.net. An experimental art program should insert her into their syllabi. 

Anyway, I think she thought I was tired, or still drunk from the night before. But I’m just a very visual learner. Talk of speeds, frequencies, vectors, and deffity mean nothing to me without the tools in front of me. I can’t tell you anything else about the first half of the class because I understood less than 0. Now the hands on portion, that’s when words regained their meaning. Subsequently, Sara Wagner had to re-explain everything to me.

Even though she described it as a machine that does not read subtly, it amazed me the sheer amount of things you can do with just one machine- etching, cutting, graphics, prototypes, fabric. The class ends with the completion of your first laser cut: a dog tag with your name on it. I made one for my girlfriend in her favorite Devil’s Night Dames orange.

Time to Fire Up.

Day II

“Everyone that lived through Vietnam, its their children that are in the war now and it’s changed their thoughts on whether or not we should be going to war at all.”

Bob Williams had the laser before me. He was cutting out a Michigan State logo to sit on the desk of one of his physicians. He cut it like a stencil, every piece separate and then layer stacked each of them to create the picture. He even cut out the wooden frame it would sit on. Bob Williams makes artwork for local VFW halls. He also has a website: Wntsimplyart.com that expresses his love for design as well as his passion for using recycled materials.

All the Tech Shop members and staff have been super friendly and willing to help someone out or just talk about life and making. After telling Bob it's my first time using the machine on my own, he watches me sit down and set up, giving me a brief summary of what Sarah discussed in detail during the laser cutting class. After he left me to my own devices it only took me about an hour just to get the thing up and running and figure out how to get something to print (ONLY an hour.) Sarah said it would take lots of testing with styles and materials to get something that we were happy with. I brought in some paper and bought a piece of wood at the door and started very simple, just cutting out and etching letters. I made some book covers for my two most recent zine publications Love Story, a trans genre study of transgender visibility, and The Last Place on Earth, a Thelma and Louise style poem following mine and my girlfriend’s trip up to the U.P. I also used the wood board to cut out some letters for my sister’s baby shower in a couple weeks. The theme is ‘TuTu Cute.’ This surprisingly only took me two tries (OK, about 5 if you count how many passes I had to do with the laser to figure out what settings would cut all the way through the board.) Overall: A successful first day. 

Day III: Riddle me This, Puzzle me That 

Sitting in the puffy circle chairs at Pier One that I always want but can never afford, I had an idea. I would make my niece a puzzle on the laser cutter for her fifth birthday. It would be shaped like a ‘My Little Pony’ and I could etch in her birth date and name. It would be the best puzzle any little girl ever received- I was aiming very high. Sarah Wagner, explained in the laser cutting class that it would take a lot of testing to get something that we wanted from the laser cutter. But for some reason, I thought that cutting letters and cutting a pony puzzle was like the same thing: how incredibly stupid of me.

The bulk of the problems I had during puzzle making round one can be explained by the fact that I have very little experience in coral and illustrator, the two programs one can use to run the laser cutter, and assumed that I would be able to use them in a similar manner to how I use programs like Photoshop and gimp. This is not true.

Learn from my mistakes.

1. Do not assume skills from one adobe suite product will translate into another.
2. Do not use stock images from the internet for your project, draw your own. This not only makes the project truly yours but it cuts out the annoying work of having to manipulate the image to get what you want. Draw what you want.
3. When making a jigsaw puzzle, remember it needs a clear border. 

4. When painting or drawing on any project, remember to test your materials. (Sharpie paint pens will work on basic wood where as 'craft pens' will bleed)

Thankfully I have a whole year before my niece's next birthday to perfect this process. 

Aftermath 

It’s freezing. Great chunks of snow are being released from the sky. Winter has become more of a nuisance than ever before. At this point, I’ve already been rear ended, there’s so much snow on our front lawn our neighbor has begun pointing the end of the snow blower into the air and praying that most of contents fall on top of our strategically placed mountains, and everyone is so seasonally depressed we’re practically OD’ing on vitamin D pills even though half of our doctors say vitamin D pills don’t actually make you happier. On this day, I woke up so frustrated by the winter situation I decided to dress in a form of protest…

And that is how I ended up walking with Brian Janowski through a snowstorm in down town Detroit wearing a pair of Capri pants and 5-inch tattoo wedge heels. Thankfully, by the time we left the bar that night, Jack Frost had ended his anti-spring temper tantrum and the streets were starting to be cleared. I explained to him my puzzle problems and we both agreed it’s past due for me to take one of the classes on illustrator. Although I understand the difference between pixels and vectors, one of them is an old friend and one of them is a man with a very strong foreign accent that I drunk dialed. If I can master vectors I can create and manipulate my own puzzle pieces without having to worry about finding a stock image offline that will ultimately cause me more problems than ease.