Project Timespan
A couple of days in September 2017
Inspiration
I’ve had never really been “into” Warhol until went to the Hergé Museum in Brussels, Belgium. I absolutely adore The Adventures of Tintin, and I will write a future post or two on the subject. During my museum visit, the most fascinating exhibit was a showcase of the relationship between Andrew Warhol and Georges Prosper Remi (penname Hergé). Both artists admired each other’s work, and Warhol actually painted a portrait of the cartoonist. A nice article on this topic is found on the Openculture website.
Thus, when I was thinking of a suitable art display for my apartment, my mind drifted to a pop art type of display. Specifically, I found intriguing the portraits of famous celebrities (e.g. Marilyn Monroe) that Warhol designed in “posterized” form. I chose Benjamin Franklin as the subject, given his prominence as a historical figure of Philadelphia as well as of my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania.
Materials
The materials used were acrylic and MDF. Each Benjamin Franklin is made of two layers glued together. The bottom layer for each of the Benjamin Franklins was made of 1/4″ white acrylic while the top consisted of 1/8″ acrylic and MDF. I selected a total of eight different acrylic colors: black, white, yellow, red, blue, light blue, green, and purple.
Project Overview
The process was very straightforward – I found a stylized version of Franklin’s portrait online, whether vectorized or not I do not remember. I recall flipping the image horizontally as I preferred to have the gaze to the left as opposed to the right. Then I imported the vectorized design into DraftSight, sized it so that each piece was 9.5″ x 9.5″ – don’t ask me how I settled on those dimensions, and then loaded it up for cutting.
One design tip I have when using lasers is to cut through from the back in two or more passes for the tightest fit. As a laser cutter incorporates heat to burn through the material, inevitably there will be a kerf. Unlike a saw blade which as a fixed kerf, however, the kerf of a laser varies in width inversely proportional to the distance from the focal point of the laser. In other words, if you set the focus to be right at the material surface, and then run a few shallow vector cuts through, the kerf will progressively narrow in a v-taper towards the bottom of the material. Therefore, by cutting from the back, it’s just a matter of flipping the piece over to reveal a thin-kerfed front side.
Each of the Benjamins has a total of ten pieces glued together in four distinct colors. One piece is the backing (1/4″ white acrylic), one piece is the background, one piece is the skin tone, and the remaining seven are the hair and facial features.
For the front of each piece, I wanted to use three different colors. To limit waste, I recycled the colors through each of the various sections, such that each color is found in three different Benjamins. After cutting out a color, which essentially was a simple vector tracing of the artwork, I used duct tape to temporarily hold all the pieces together. In this manner, I cut out the nine colors and the nine backings before bringing it all back to my apartment for assembly.
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Alright, time for me to go on a small tangent:
Mathematically, there are 504 permutations to select three colors out of nine. However, given that a color can only appear thrice, once as background, once as hair, and once as skin tone, how many sets of nine combinations exist?
Although I’m sure there is an elegant script online with proper searching, I thought it would be a good exercise to write a MATLAB code to do it. I’m still figuring out a method to do this, but I’ll see if I can figure it out eventually…
Reflection
The Benjamin Franklin project went extremely well – the only hassle was to make sure I securely taped everything lest one of the small pieces fall out and force me to go back to make a replacement. Fortunately, this did not happen! The two other slightly annoying things were that the super glue I used was a pain in the butt (mostly operator error) and that the 1/8″ acrylic was nominal such that different colors had slight differences in thickness.
As part of reflecting, I noticed that the Benjamin Franklins do tend to reflect light from the acrylic surfaces. I can fix this by sanding down the surfaces, though I am not sure whether or not I want to create a matte finish. It would also be a good deal of sanding as not all the acrylic colors is of equal thickness. Maybe I’ll leave it for now – it’s looked great thus far (other than when taking pictures).