The Personal Blog of Dr Banksy*.

Laser cut stencils of my scissors design are now finished. I simply took the layers of design which I'd previously made up in Illustrator and spaced them out. I had to check for any double paths which might have resulted from the spacing out process - these needed to be deleted. The Illustrator file was then sent via memory stick to a PC connected to the college's laser cutter (see below).  The designs were then put into laser cutting software (similar to 2D Design). Either the copying over or issues with the raw file itself resulted in a few instances of "double paths" (extra cutlines layered over the originals) which needed to be removed. This was easy to do (via use of the "Delete" key), but very important because cutting a line twice over into 3mm MDF with a laser cutter that could probably do with a good servicing presents the slight risk of an inferno .  The laser cutter works by firing a laser beam through a focusing lens which is mixed...

Who knew that doing nothing could be so exhausting? The printing of my final pieces is now finished. A quick jaunt over to Knightstone campus on the other side of town, and I found myself in the print room. Nothing surprising - pretty messy and running tech that was probably groundbreaking ten years ago. We were given a 1 hour 15 slot to complete all of our printing. The first sight of this was my first little worry; someone had seriously underestimated the time it takes not just to print something, but to print it right . To be fair, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the printer I was using - a Roland VP-540i. Very solid piece of kit, and it can print at a very high quality. Unfortunately, the PC that it was hooked up to was running Windows XP . Huh. Nothing wrong with XP either, but it's really not built for running complicated printing software. At all. So if you're wondering how long the printing process actually took, let me cut to the chase. We arrived at th...

*Bored of this title yet? So I'm now pretty much done with this Spy vs Spy piece. Thanks to a very helpful guide that I found online after a great deal of searching, I've been able to create die-lines around my composition's shapes (i.e. White Spy, Black Spy and the breathing mask). These are needed to show the vinyl cutter where it needs to cut around in order to create a sticker. I'm going to be using a different method to create my final piece than I'd originally thought, and it's ridiculously less time-consuming. See, I'd thought that I'd be using the vinyl cutter to cut out each of the individual vector shapes which make up my final pieces, and then layer them to create the final effect (like a stencil). However, I hadn't understood that I'm actually able to print each design straight onto white vinyl and then that in turn can be cut out all by itself to make a sticker. That means I'll only have one layer to deal with, so I'll ...