Glass/Rotary Laser Project

question

For this project, I was asked to create a laser-rastered design on a glass in Adobe Illustrator for a client based on their interests. The design had to cover at least 180 degrees of the glass surface and half of its height. Once I was finalized with my design, I would then transfer it to the rotary tool and engrave the design onto a glass.

brainstorm

Based off of my interview with my mom, I decided to incorporate one of her favorite plants, rosemary. I wanted the laser cut to be in the middle of the cup and clearly be a rosemary plant. I looked up images of what rosemary looks like and concluded with these two drawings of rosemary. 

prototyping

This was my CAD of a rosemary plant using my brainstorm picture as the base design for it. I image-traced the original image and created the CAD of it; however, capturing the intricate details of the plant proved very difficult to me. The original image had a lot of details on it and I had to delete a lot of the excess lines on the CAD to avoid having too much detail that the rotary tool wouldn't be able to develop. I ended up with a very simple CAD image that had very visible lines for the tool to be able to engrave onto the glass cup.

iteration

I only had one iteration for this project and it turned out good. I think the most challenging aspect of this process was ensuring that the glass engraving was executed with the correct depth, as there was little room for error (since we only had one attempt). Next time, I would have made my design with less detail and more surface area to cover the glass cup.

final product

This is my final product for the glass rotary project. I am overall very satisfied with how it turned out. I think if I got to do this project again in the future I would opt for a larger, less intricate design to better utilize the surface area of the glass. That said, my client was extremely happy with how her vision came to life, and she now uses the glass regularly.