300x300 layered art
Instruction
I thought some nice layered art would be a nice gift for my wife and a good way to showcase my work. I took a design that had been made as an SVG and edited it to work with XCS then did the cuts to fit into the 300mmx300mm , or 12"x12", frame. My wife loved it and it has brought in a number of commissions already!
I used a manual process to cut the card stock to 300mmx300mm to ensure that all the card would fit into the frame and work as expected
I used Inkscape to create guides for both the outline of the 300mm square stock and the cut out section for the “view”. This enabled me to centralise the images as best as possible. I like Inkscape as it processes SVG images natively and allows simple, yet accurate, moving of the vectors within the images. I created a view port of 230x230 centralise within the 300mmx300mm image. and then I could ensure that the image was 220x220mm and offset by 5mm from each edge of the viewport.
Save each SVG with the line defined in a different colour to the guides. This ensures that the guides are uploaded to a different layer within XCS and can then easily be ignored, while also allowing easy lining up with the card stock. I also used the colour of the card stock within the file name so it was easier to remember which piece of stock would be used for each layer.
I then cut each piece of card stock with the laser. I know that I could have just as easily used the drag knife, but I am used to the laser settings and these are also nice a clean.
Each layer can simply be assembled on top of the last and aligned really simply as each piece was cut with the top left corner aligned in the machine each time