Test Piece 1
© 2012 Craig Ashby
Collage
7.5″ x 7.5″

It has taken some time, but here is the first test piece for the new series, which will look nothing like this. But I needed an image that was quick and graphic, so I pulled out Itek-Craig09 for the test, another self-portrait of me, Craig Ashby. I rarely show demos or test pieces, so consider this a gift.

The new plotter/cutter is amazingly fast. It cut all four images in under five minutes. The fidelity of the cutter is amazing. Those squares are just three inches wide so the tiny bits are extremely tiny.

There are some issues. The plotter/cutter doesn’t seem too friendly with the clay coated papers found in magazines. It seems to break the top side edge of the cuts but not the bottom side facing the cutting mat.

This provides for a bit of a head game involving mirrors. Which is quite a task for me to get my head around. You should see the difficulty I experience when using two mirrors two clean up the back of my neck with a razor.

The bottom two are sprayed with an acrylic clear coat to mitigate the roughness caused by the blade. But I planned poorly because of the mirroring. So each piece is a mixture of sprayed and unsprayed, not providing any way to properly judge the merits of spraying the pieces before cutting.

The registration is also an issue. It’s less than stellar. But I was trying to bang this out in pure excitement. The new series/process is going to be about patience and surgical skill. Time to upgrade that skill set.