Geometric Animal - Stained Glass Design
This tutorial will use the text to vector graphic ai tool in adobe illustrator to help you come up with an illustration to use as template for your laser cut geometric design. The key to using ai to effectively in any design is to understand that design is an iterative process. What you ask ai to produce will often times be a little off and needs some adjustments before you can consider it a final product and this project is no different. This geometric animal design may start as an ai produced drawing but the final design is designed by you.
Design Steps
The overall size of this design is intended to fit within a 6in square. With that as the size of your art board the stroke weight used for the line work is set to 7pt. This allows for a thick enough line to be laser cut with out any further adjustments but you are welcome to adjust the line weight to your liking.
Step 1
Ask Adobe Illustrator Ai tool text to vector graphic to come up with an animal design. It helps to ask it to create a geometric design because it will give you a better outline to trace that looks closer to what you want your final design to be.
Step 2
Once you have selected a design, start to outline the design with the pen tool. Try not to curve any of your lines and only use straight line segments so it will look more like geometric stained glass.
Step 3
With the design traced to your liking you now will outline the stroke.
object > path > outline stroke
This is an important step because with a simple stroke, regardless of the weight you assign, the laser will just cut a single line down the middle. By outlining the stroke you will now have two paths that the laser will follow set to the width of the stroke.
Construction Steps
