Tag: Art-ish

My initial process of picking punched cards from the top of the stack, taping them together, then cutting a layer of the eagle produced unpredictable results when there weren’t enough holes to be interesting or a card joint appeared in a conspicuous spot:

I now arrange the SVG image of the card’s holes for best effect on each eagle layer:

The small squares near the corners of the image appear on every layer to properly register all the eagle outlines.

Mirroring the layout produces the hole pattern as seen from the back side of the cards, where the tape is applied:

Then it’s (relatively) easy to align the cards while muttering “the rightmost hole in the lower sequence number is just about aligned with the upper card edge, which puts the middle-ish hole in the group of four in the 9 row over the left hole of those two” and so on and so forth. Cut off a strip of tape, carefully lay it along the joint between the cards, and add them to the outgoing pile.

The top two layers are cut with the back = unprinted = blank side of the card upward to produce the eagle’s white head, with the outlines strategically located to avoid shredding the feathers with holes:

The value of this process becomes more apparent for the nine cards making up the bottom layer:

Most of the white tail comes from the reversed card in the bottom row, inset into the two cards above it. The next layer covers those sections of the legs and olive branch, which is easy to confirm by aligning the layers using their border squares.

The layout mirrored for easier taping:

This is from a previous layout, but the improvement is obvious:

The trick with all this is to select only the eagle outline for cutting amid all the card details. Although putting the cards on a tool layer would avoid that problem, the holes are much less visible and they’re pretty much the entire point of this process.

Aligning the taped cards on the platform with the to-be-cut outline follows much the same process as aligning the printed cards for punching:

• Select the cards and the eagle outline
• Snap to the middle of the LightBurn workspace with the P key
• Focus the laser on the cards if you haven’t already done so
• Move the laser head to one of the card bevels using Ctrl-L and clicking on one end of the bevel
• Skootch the cards to put that bevel at the red dot pointer location under the laser head
• Move the laser head to another bevel
• Skootch the cards as needed
• Iterate until satisfied
• Fire The Laser

Although each card layout has the four targets used to cut it from the printed card stock, those targets no longer exist on the cards because they’ve been cut off.

You could use Print and Cut to align the LightBurn workspace to the cards, but it’s easier and faster to just skootch the cards around.

Actually cutting the outline takes a few seconds and is kinda anticlimactic after all that setup.

Fixing some of the outstanding issues produces another Apollo Eagle from layers of punched cards:

Stipulated: nobody ever ran punched cards through a multi-color printing process. A posterized version of the Apollo 11 mission patch eagle just seemed appropriate for cards containing a chunk of the mission source code.

Putting the tail feathers on two layers of reversed cards definitely improved the outcome:

The lines across two of the tail feathers come from inadvertently printing a quilting pattern intended for Letter paper after setting up a stack of 1/3 Letter blanks. Trust me on this: you do not discard any salvageable blooper cards.

The wing feathers get more definition and have sculptured upper layers:

The olive branch improved with fewer layers and contouring the claws makes them less chunky:

The beak and head now have slight contouring, with the neck feathers standing out nicely over the logo below:

Although this is the third almost-ready version, it rests on the wings of many previous attempts:

The card joints on successive layers are now farther apart, although the long run across the middle of the body stands out more than I expected. The small pieces of cards at the top of the wings need more contrast.

With some lessons learned from the first pass, the bottom layer of the Apollo Eagle gets a reversed card for the white tail feathers:

Which looks like this just after cutting the outline:

Gently removing the scrap from the edges reveals the eagle:

The top two layers also come from a reversed card, with those shapes arranged to put the holes in attractive places:

The five layers in between as a slide show:

It took a while to get over cutting up all those nice cards.

Some deft glue stick work produces a layered eagle:

I managed to get a dark bottom in the nostril, which turned out weird:

All in all, though:

• Fewer layers are better
• The head came out OK-ish
• The bottom layer card arrangement is too fussy
• The olive branches still look weird
• The claws are still ugly
• The tail needs more contrast, perhaps two layers
• Having horizontal card splices aligned on successive layers is bad

More study is definitely in order …

What with punching the Apollo 11 CSM source code into the cards, converting the mission’s eagle into a layered shape made some sense.

The original Apollo 11 mission patch:

After considerable faffing, a few of the fifteen layers look like this in GIMP:

Each layer is a connected white region defining the cut perimeter, which will expose some part of the layer(s) below it in the stack. The small squares in the corners provide a bounding box to make all the layers snap to the same location.

Then:

• Select each layer’s shape + corner boxes with GIMP’s Color Select tool
• Convert the selection to a path
• Export paths as SVG files (all fifteen of them!)
• Import SVGs into LightBurn & arrange neatly
• Put outlines on a cut layer, corner squares on a tool layer
• Burn each layer separately

Testing the concept with packing paper looked surprisingly good:

A few key layers on punched cards:

The changes for each of those iterations required tweaking the original layer images to eliminate obvious-in-retrospect problems, recreating the SVG files, and importing into LightBurn. This is a relentlessly manual process.

Then I ran a full-up test of all fifteen layers on cards punched with the Apollo source code.

Cutting the head layers from face-down cards made them sufficiently white, although it’d be nice to have a different beak color and darker eyes :

I must arrange the cards with text to put more holes in the wings, although too many will cause fragile feathers:

The white tail should be also done with face-down cards, more holes, and the three-way joint between the cards shifted under the tail layers to its left:

The feet and olive branch were a total faceplant, as successive layers did not register accurately enough to overlay the leaves:

Not to mention those ug-u-lee claws.

The wing layers need more rounding along their edges, perhaps with some thin cuts to emphasize the feathers.

On the whole, though, I think it turned out well.

Things to do:

• Registration holes / pins up to the top layer
• Remove speckles on all the layers
• Arrange cards for more hole density where needed
• Better glue application
• Different card colors?