Building off my first project with the GF I decided to iterate it into something more challenging: animation.
To recap the process: I engrave 3 separate wood blocks for each frame: one for each color to appear in the final print. I think run them through my roller press to get prints on paper.
Where my first tiny target print used 3 basic circles at 2" each, this project required 24 separate blocks with much finer detail than before. Each block took around 30 minutes to engrave. It then took half the day yesterday to run my first round of prints, which is honestly much quicker than expected.
Here are the blocks and prints stacked together.
And here’s the set of them all animated together:
It’s jumpy because it’s only 8 frames. It’s based on a processing script that randomly generates little clumps of circles that expand outwards. I’ll now mount it onto pages to be sewn into its own book.
In future prints I’ll probably replace the light green with a brighter color to stand out more but overall I’m happy. As a test of the precision of the GF machine I think it passed with flying colors.
On using draftboard, none of the blocks have shown any signs of warping yet but the process of washing the blocks after printing is wet and it feels inevitable that they’ll even after spraying them with an acrylic varnish. I’d probably switch to delrin but I don’t really want to work with plastics until I’m much more confident in my venting system. Also, on a few of the finest lines broke off when I was taking the protective tape off after engraving. That mostly hasn’t been an issue, though.
EDIT: I fixed the animation so the background white didn’t change color each frame