"I love the smell of MDF in the morning."

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 with gas (in this case, it's CO2). The gas is required to give the laser its cutting properties by increasing the temperature in the laser chamber. The laser is then fed out of a nozzle and onto the media, producing a cut. To start off the cutting, however, the laser needs to be concentrated on the start point. This doesn't take too long with a sheet of 3mm MDF, but if it stays on too long, it'll burn. Thankfully, the college laser cutter was correctly attuned to 3mm MDF, so we were fine there.

And here's the result of the cutting - a little bit of burning here and there, but that's not so much of an issue since these are just the stencils. 

That brings us on nicely to the spraying! I bought myself a couple of Plastikote spray paints in black and grey (next-day delivery, God bless Amazon Prime), and set to work in one of the more isolated areas of college with the door very much open and a breathing mask very much on. I sprayed onto some A2 white card and experimented with a number of colour options, layering the black and grey whilst leaving some white in areas, just to play around with different looks for the scissors. My favourites of these I'll then cut out, and they'll be part of the final exhibition. 

Here is the final A2 sheet. I think my spray painting skills could use some work (it gets a little blotchy in some places), but overall I'm very happy.

Here's a closer look at each design.

My first try, and ironically, it's probably my second-favourite of the bunch. The grey shadows are in just the right places, and I love the way that the black paint fades into tiny blotches around the right handle, it lends an interesting texture to the piece and makes it seem weathered, which I really like as these parts contrast nicely with the bolder, harder elements of the design (chiefly, the right finger hole and blade edges - they look deep and sharp respectively, especially in black).

The final stencil I created. I actually really like this one - it's bold, but due to the fact that it's only a single stencil layer, it could be somewhat difficult to make out what it is (scissors) at first glance. This gives an eerie feel to this design, which I think is amplified by the heavy use of grey on white.

This was my first attempt at bleeding the black into the grey around the scissor handles. I like the way it's turned out because it plays on the viewer's innate perceptions of 2D and 3D - the left handle appears 3D because of the black shadow around it, but the right one is more 2D because of the flat grey colour. Like it!

If you ask me, this one rocks. I've got the grey shadows pretty good, the paint quality is staunch and sharp, and the blemishes around the edges create a juxtaposition of rushed work. Quality work completed quickly? Nice.

I like to think of this design as the "negative" version of my original scissors vector. Around the left handle, I've swapped the grey shadows and black edges around, which I think gives a new dimension to the piece by making the scissors appear heavy and strong. This could even give rise to a very interesting connotation for my deforestation piece - it emphasises the brutality of the machines that people use to cut down gentle and comparatively fragile trees.

This was actually one of the last stencils I did. I got the grey shadows spot on but might have spoiled it a bit with that right-hand finger hole. Still, I does give a degree of depth to this design, and I quite like the texture that some of the black paint has given some of the edges.

Good stuff. Now all that needs to happen with these is to get them cut out (with scissors, dear irony) and stuck onto some mount-boards. Sorted...