Emergency Working Artist Project Grant FY21
Emergency Working Artist Project Grant FY21
Laser Spirit
Tara Makinen: former-Executive Director of Itasca Orchestra and Strings, musician; Tammy Mattonen: Executive Director of Itasca Orchestra and Strings, visual artist, co-founder of Crescendo Youth Orchestra; Kathy Neff: musician, Director, Fine Arts Academy at the University of Minnesota-Duluth; Ron Piercy: jeweler, gallery owner; Emily Swanson: arts administrator at Oldenburg Arts and Cultural Community; Kris Nelson: artist, teacher; Roxann Berglund: musician; Bill Payne: Professor of Theater at the University of Minnesota-Duluth
Tara Makinen: former-Executive Director of Itasca Orchestra and Strings, musician; Kris Nelson: artist, teacher; Classie Dudley: ARAC Equity Fellow; Christine Marcotte: writer
ACHF Arts Access
Goal: Build a Spirit Mask collage in colored plexiglass; to a have one completed piece as part of a new body of work. I will use vector graphics software (Illustrator or Flash) to prepare the scanned drawing and obtain shapes to be cut with my Glowforge Laser Cutter, scan/import into Illustrator several drawings to determine what might work best. The raster image is posterized (color separated) and vectorized (edges found) so that each shape is a closed polyline suitable to be cut by the laser. I can also ?fill? each shape with a color that corresponds to the colors of plexiglass I have available to see a mock-up of what the finished piece will look like. The 1/4 colored plexi shapes are cut and then cemented to a large piece of clear plexiglass. The piece will be framed and suspended so that light from the back will show through. This funding will help me continue my artistic creativity in this time of COVID and move into new areas as an interdisciplinary and cultural artist. This is the natural progression to continue my on going body of spirit mask artworks. I have shown that I have all the required skills to complete this project including the technical abilities and familiarity with the equipment together with the creative vision to use it. I own all the equipment needed. I have in my home studio: - Glowforge CO2 class-1 Laser Cutter - laptop computer for laser interface - Plustek High resolution scanner - Desktop Computer for graphics - Adobe graphics software I will know the first stage is successful when I have scanned the image and successfully vectorized it so I can create a mockup of the piece as it will appear in plexiglass. For fabrication success is measured by 1) clean cut shapes of colored plexi 2) seamless gluing of pieces (with special plexiglass cement) 3) assuredness it will hold 4) opacity of light
I have completed one plexiglass piece and I have a effective method to digitize drawings and have a firm workable process to create 2d and 3d plexiglass art. The digital process of scanning a drawing, tracing the image, scaling to size and porting to the laser software has been fully developed. I scan and manually trace the drawings and then choose the colors instead of using the colors from the color separation. The digital colors were much different than the the actual colors of the drawing because the computer uses an RGB color model. I would have ended up choosing them manually anyway. For fabrication, after seeing the cuts on the different thicknesses and types of plexi I ordered 1/8" cast translucent colored plexiglass and two kinds of plexiglass glue (IPS 3 and 4) and the fast drying one was all I needed since I was gluing plexi to plexi.