I haven’t messed around really with any photo/image engravings since I got the Glowforge. Wouldn’t you know, I lay down to take a nap after click… click… click… for hours in Illustrator custom pathing some puzzles and I pondered what a Vary Power engrave would look like on a sugar skull. Maybe keychain size. Or fridge magnet size.
A couple of minutes in Photoshop to come up with a sharp looking image (and I mean unsharp mask, pushed way far) and an outline to copy into Illustrator, a minute in Illustrator to place the cutline and export as a SVG.
Pretty freakin’ awesome is what it looked like. I could finagle around with some actual lighting instead of just straight Glowforge/ambient overhead lighting to illustrate the depth better… maybe next time.
(Dia de Los Muertos is a pretty big deal down here… I’ve been moving through a number of wholesale orders for it here in town. People are eating it up. Crazy.)
Very nice. That day is fast approaching. The park near my house has a massive fireworks display. So I host a party every year. Maybe this year I can have little sugar skulls to hand out to my guests.
So many ideas!!! and now that I have my forge, they are coming to fruition.
Cultural question from an alien.
Do you think that the way the skull as an icon seems to permeate a lot of different aspects of North American culture, and by diffusion, Western culture generally, might be attributed to an origin in South America, and the popularity of this particular festival ?
Huge resonance in cultures mixing Spanish Memento Mori skulls (St. Teresa of Avila kept one on her desk to emulate St. Jerome) with indigenous American cultures. There was very frequently a skull under the cross of Jesus in depictions of the crucifixions (Golgotha, place of the skull). I’ve been thinking a lot about this since my trip to Mexico earlier this year.
I suppose it’s hardly surprising that the universal(?) veneration for ancestors, presumably as some sort of acknowledgement of the value of knowledge and experience, coupled with the easy identification of the skull as being human, turns the skull into a symbol of that veneration.
