Stacked Wood Art
For this digital media project, I chose to do stacked wood art which entails producing a sketch, digitizing those sketches, laser cutting the wood, assembling the project, and then creating post-production videos.
Artist Statement
My inspiration for this project came from many different sources. As I looked at examples of stacked wood art and past students’ work, I was influenced by the intricate line work of pieces and the way of showing a story. I wanted mine to become a scene in which you can picture something happening, not just an object. That was how I decided to create a rolling ocean scene with a small boat sailing under the moon. I feel like I grew my spatial and artistic skills. This project has you take multiple sheets of 2D paper images and layer them until they create something 3D. I had to take a step back and learn to recognize what each layer would look like once it came together. I encountered the struggle of artist block. This project was so vast and I had never done anything like this before so I was intimidated and unsure. I wanted to make sure it was good which made me second guess myself and my work. I think that this is a struggle that a lot of people face but once I made decisions and pushed forward I was able to build this new skill of wood art and be more confident in my artistry.
I would like to tweak my project in a few different ways. I would want to add a border or built-in frame around it so that the height was built more consistently and it wasn’t super shallow in the sky but super tall where the water is. Also, I would have changed the overall shape of the project to have been a rectangle so that it looked cleaner and stood up nicely. I am most proud of my laser cut file because it took me a long time to create all of the different layers and shapes so that the ocean waves would have depth and texture. I think I will use these ideas in my future projects because I am now able to understand the basic shapes that would make up scenes and objects and better comprehend spatial relationships and how the product will look. After doing this project, I have greater respect for people who are very good at wood art and do projects with a lot of detail and intensity. I had felt that I had a lot of parts but when I look at professionals I am amazed at how detailed they are. It is a cool art form that takes practice.
Sketches
Production
After sketching out the layers, we had to draw them out in Illustrator. Those are all of the lines that were cut into the wood and show all of the layers overlapping to create a whole picture.
Final Product
Build Video
After we go the layers burned into the wood, we assembled the final project. We took photos between each layer to show it being built and created a video from those photos.
After Effects 3D Video
Using our Illustrator file and the knowledge of After Effects, we animated an in-depth view of our wood art. I used cameras, lighting, and coloring in the layers to create the overall video.