#engravin

Hans Sebald Beham - 1541

Originally I had intended my 4D piece to be my 3D piece but after making the mailbox interactive I needed to come up with a new idea for 3D. 

My 3D piece involved me creating actual rubber stamps using the material lino block. I had designed 4 different stamps to represent different social media platforms that included text. Engraving text by hand is very difficult especially when it is done at such as small scale. So rather than creating a stamp by hand I decided to get my stamps laser cut professionally to get clean and even lines.

I waited until the week before to get my work laser cut which in hindsight was not the best idea. There was a 4 business day wait for any work being put into the queue. Luckily that still gave me 2 days before the due date to assemble my stamps after being engraved. Once my stamps were engraved there was not a lot of work to be done to them. 

The rapid prototyping was fairly simply the only difficult part was setting up my Illustrator file. Since I was creating a stamp I had reversed my image and inverted the colours as well to make sure it would engrave properly. However; when I got to the rapid prototyping, the technician told me that the machine will automatically reverse the image and colour for stamp mode. So I wasted some time configuring my design for stamp mode when I did not need to. 

-----4 days later------

I picked up my job and saw that they left the residue and sawdust on the lino block. They said to simply just rinse it off. The film that was sitting on the block when I picked it up was a yellow tinted filming dust layer. When i lightly grazed the block the stuff started to come off. It was not too hard to rinse off. I merely took some paper towel and ran my block under the faucet. When I let it dry the block changed colour to light brown.