Multi-layer paper art - alien love worm

My first attempt at doing multi-layer art inspired by the work of Gabriel Schama (his work on 1/8" plywood, with pieces up to 8’ in size)

Living in a coastal area, I used a whale tail, waves, hearts, peace sign to compose this multi-layer illustrator image. Learned a lot about illustrator (combining arcs into a shape is surprisingly hard). And I’m sure I did a lot of things the hard way (in both illustrator and creating one SVG per layer … only to realize I could have each layer be a different color and use the web UI to ignore the layers I don’t want to cut… next time)

I’ve posted a few more pictures on instagram

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Very nice start. Please post your future projects as you refine your workflow and perfect your control of Illustrator.

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Wow! I love the whale tail - thought it was a random geometric design until I read that it was a whale tail and then it was a “duh” moment :slight_smile:

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That is truly lovely!

Wonderful! Can’t wait to see the progression!

WOW! We need more projects like this. Regardless of how long it took you to do this, the results are great. I always look at my projects that took a long time and thank them, because I may learn the hard way, but I learn how to do it because of it.

Great design and colors

Thanks for the kind words :slight_smile:

I’m waiting on more paper. In the mean time I decided to start publishing my notes again. I’ve posted more notes about the process and shared the SVGs on my site http://m4ke.org/projects/alien-love-worm.html

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Very cool!

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Saw this linked to from the Glowforge twitter account and loved it- I’ve been doing some much smaller experiments in a similar vein but need to study your tutorial on Illustrator to understand how to get so much more fine control!

Wow … Turned out beautiful!

Very cool. If you haven’t already, consider checking out the pathfinder tool to help you make/combine/subtract shapes.