Chinese New Years Box


Styled in homage to the decorative red paper cut-outs seen around the lunar new year, there were multiple exploratory goals with this project.

The first was to see exactly how suitable a ‘mobile device’ was for content creation. The past default go-to tool would’ve been pulling out the notebook, the mouse, and a graphics tablet (Wacom) for some of the premeditated tasks. I’m happy to report that Affinity Designer on a 2015 iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil has proven itself a compelling setup for allowing all-day untethered freedom.


Kudos to Affinity for honing a finger-gesture system that worked in perfect unity with the Pencil. (Lots of YouTube How-to videos on this). Isometric constraining objects, undo-ing, redo-ing, object copying became muscle-memory within the first session.

Next concern was that maybe the thin vegetation stalks would get obliterated by the laser’s kerf. There’s only one way to find out. YOLO!!!

Liking the results…

Everything came out intact!

A few quick coats of red from a rattle can…

and easy assembly with some wood glue.

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Nice.
Really like how you’ve done the corners to make them fit together.
What does the big kanji and the word under the pig say?

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Nice new year box.

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Really lovely boxes! Thanks for the process description. I’m glad to hear things went so well with AD—I bought it but haven’t used it much. Too lazy to put the time in, but maybe I should give it another go.

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Excellent job! Nice that you were able to work through and get comfortable with the software so quickly.

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Very nicely done…and those thin little cuts…wow! :smile:

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:boom: Beautiful! :boom:
Begging for one of those LED little candles :gift_heart:

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Nicely done! The red really pops.

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Double Happiness

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Wonderful! The joinery melts into the design and the red is great! I guess I need to play more with AD. Thanks!

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Love it, nicely done.

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Our li’l ol’ place in Chicago.

Next revision will likely see the first letter in each word stretched higher to make it more legible in this smushed silhouette format.

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Wow!! Very cool!

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Dang it, now I’m hungry!

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