Until I am unseated, I am claiming the world’s record for the largest Glowforge project. 20 plus sheets of Draftboard. total picture size is 3’ wide x 6’ tall. I am not done with the painting, mounting or framing, but the Glowforge work is done.
I learned lots of things by trial and error. My first idea was to cut every piece out individually, paint them, and reassemble like a mosaic but I found out real fast that this was incredibly difficult to keep track of the pieces. Plus small one fell down into the honeycomb bed and were lost.
I then decided to use the score function and created sections of the drawing as large as I could print in one go. This worked well but takes alot of time figuring out where to make the separations so the final picture looks like one whole. Plus it takes about twice as much draftboard as you would think because you cannot use the entire board effectively.
The next thing I learned is that the masking is your friend when it comes to painting. I ripped off all the masking on a few pieces and started to paint. Not a big deal, but it is much faster and easier to remove one section of masking at a time, paint that, remove the next area, paint that and so on. Plus the result is better.
The artwork was created from a photo. I cropped the photo to how I wanted it. Posterized it in Inkscape. Took the resulting simplified picture into Draftsight and manually traced everything using Splines. I separated all the print sections in Draftsight to 19.4 x 10.4" printable areas and exported these back into Inkscape to get the printable SVG files. quite a convoluted method.
I used this program to match colors from the posterized image to colors at my paint store.
I had them match small color sample containers of paint and I mix the rest myself as needed.
A few more weeks and I should be done.
What I found interesting about this project is that until I got the Glowforge, I would never have thought about doing something like this. But the Glowforge is inspiring me to attempt new things and is bringing out creativity that I never knew I had.
So this is all single layer, puzzle-pieced together then? Nifty idea to hide the seams by making them run along color changes, even if it did mean using a lot more material, the end product will likely benefit from the choice.
Unbelievable! It’s a larger than life topographic map of a peep! What a clever idea! Can’t wait to see the finished project!
(Coincidentally, it does surpass the former record of something like 17 sheets for that wren birdhouse, if it were to be cut out of PG instead of cardboard.)
I may take you up on the largest print challenge when i finally get my unit. I just don’t think my wife will appreciate a giant portrait of video game characters all over the house.
