Bottle scene idea and development

For the next scene, I wanted to create an environment that reflected more on the reference to Captain Wentworth and the Navy in Persuasion. Earlier in the project I had explored this through the image of a ship in a bottle, held in a woman's hands. Despite considering this as a possible layered image in the model box, I decided to take a different take on this idea. Following on from experimenting with shadows in the first photo shoot, I was keen to explore different methods of creating shadows. I had the idea to fabricate a shadow shaped like a ship sail with negative space. The negative space would be cut out of bottles hanging down in the model box. In theory, two layers of these bottles would give the illusive suggestion of a sail.

The two above images are plans for the bottle scene idea. The right image shows a quick experiment I did over a couple pages of my sketchbook.

I attempted to achieve this scene by drawing out the sail shape on tracing paper, then drawing the bottles on top, revealing snippets of the sail through negative space. With little prepared for the laser cutter, I also decided to use these images as a basis for my laser cutting experiments. This way I could have this design cut in lots of different colours for the next shoot, as well as developing upon my Adobe illustrator skills.

When i had last used the laser cutter, I had scanned in ink drawings, make quick selections, creating paths that were imported into illustrator ready to be laser cut. On this occasion, the pencil lines were too light to be picked up by the selection tool. Therefore, I was faced with either drawing over the drawing in pen or using the pen tool in illustrator to trace over the image. Eager to learn a new skill, I decided to trace with the pen tool. It was extremely time consuming task. I had only a small amount of knowledge of pen tool, which i'd learnt at college. However, the time payed off resulting in much cleaner cut images than if I had cut it by hand or scanned in a pen drawing. One of the layers, I hadn't prepared in time, and as i had run out time at the laser cutter, I was forced to hand cut the image. This was extremely frustrating, as I had almost finished tracing the image in illustrator, and after watching the other layers being laser cut in 5 mins. hand cutting one image took me two hours. It was a very beneficial lesson. I now know how to prepare images for the laser cutter by drawing in illustrator. A coursemate also has taught me a couple of shortcuts to cut down time when tracing images. This is mainly on straight lines that can be copy and pasted.


I was able to laser cut a few different colours of two of the three layers.

Whilst I was over in the workshop the past day and a half, i requested for some wood to be cut to the scale size of my last model box. Luckily, they were happy to give me the wood for free. A definite bonus considering the amount of money I had already spent on thick paper for this project. I asked advice how to ensure the best construction of the box. The technician suggested wood glue and screwing the box together. Luckily, one of my housemates owns a power drill, that I am able to use to put together the box.