Day 3: Josey

Today was a very exciting day because I was able to start printing my shadowbox! I spent most of the morning refining the details and making sure everything fit together nicely, then in the afternoon I was able to use the laser cutter. I thought I had a decent idea of how to use the laser cutter from deisgn tech last year, but it turns out I did not. After getting all of my layers in the correct format to print I got all set up at the laser cutter. This took a refresher lesson and a couple of attempts to get everything correct, but eventually I was able to print all my layers. On the first round of printing there were a few mistakes that I wanted to correct, so I made the edits then printed those layers again. Although this process began with me thinking I would be done somewhat quickly--this was not the case. Each time I would make and edit and reprint, I would realize several more that I needed to make. This led me to spend much more time designing, but hopefully in the end it will be worth it. I kept making updates that made the city seemed more to scale, and I also fixed smaller pieces that did not look as good printed out as I had hoped. 

                                                Rough stacking of my first draft of layers

Although printing out made me realize I still have a lot of work left to do, it also was really nice to see on paper how my design looked. Even though you can somewhat visualize it through adobe illustrator, it sometimes does not show everything exactly how it is going to look once it is printed out. By the end of the day I was really happy that I had made an attempt at printing, because now I have time to experiment and try out different ideas, including adding windows to the fist layer of buildings and their reflections, and continuing to work on the size of the second layer of buildings. Hopefully tomorrow will be as productive and even more successful of a day! 

The left is the first round of changes with the right being the original