Being an enthusiast of art, I have always been looking for artwork that is not as expensive as actual pieces of art but also more pronounced than a poster. In my final project for the DIY class, I believe I discovered what I am look for!

I realized that laser cutting and etching acrylic sheets of different colors may allow me to create a painting by combining combining them into one painting.

Therefore, the goal of my project was to create a physical painting with the used of colored plexiglass. To do that, I planned to apply computer vision techniques to exctract the edges of paintings, based on which I could then laser cut the desired shapes.

The painting I planned to create is The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai Katsushika. It is one of my sister's favorite pieces of art, and I was hoping to gift it to her for Chistmas!

To do engraving and laser cutting out of sheet acrylic, I needed to extract shape from a painting. Computer vision techniques were really helpful with that.

I wrote a script in Python which, using the OpenCV library, allows to get different levels of edges by trimming the thresholds of the Canny Edge technique.

In arriving at the actual painting I was going to fabricate, I explored different pieces of art and how well-defined edges are in those.

The photos on the left hand side indicate that edge extraction left messy pictures and also that for some paintings, defining the main shapes seemed impossible due to their complexity.

Considering this, I used a simplified version of the Great Wave off Kanagawa and then tidied up the image to have well-defined areas of the same color.

I explored a lot in terms of what colors I will be able to use in the painting. I look at different colors, raster settings, and number of passes.

In the process, for each color that I thought might be useful, I created engraved boxes with different raster settings to see what shades of different colors I can use.

Another area of exploration was ensuring that no piece is so thin that the laser cutter's size causes that piece to shrink so much that it disappears.

In the first iteration of the painting, I found that many the width of many pieces was to small, and so many white elements were missing.

In terms of the colors, I also learned a lot of how these shades of colors actually worked together. In turned out that even if there was a difference between engraved boxes, in the painting that was not always as apparent.

In addition, with some acrylic sheets, I was able to get a lot change in color with engraving, while with others not so much. Matching colors from a painting to those I can produce with laser cutting proved very interesting.

At the end of the day, I was relatively happy with the prototype, but I also generated a lot of feedback for my next, final iteration.

I decided to use 7 different colors of acrylic that are listed in the photo on the left side. In addition to the painting itself, I also decided to include a frame.

In a manner similar to what coloring books do, I classified each area given by my computer vision function to a color I was able to product. In total, I used 12 different shaded of colors for the painting.

Once I had a plan in, I got to laser cutting, which altogether took around 10 hours. The piece of the sky was particularly long - 1 engraving pass on chosen settings took around an hour.

Finally, I got all the pieces I needed and I began gluing each part to plywood. For gluing, I used acrylic cement.

Here, on the right side is the final "painting" I created. It has really pronounced and vivid colors, and looks really composed.

The gaps between each piece of acrylic are small, and for the most part invisible.

I am particularly happy with Japanese signs, the color scheme, and the way the whole piece comes together to form a painting out of disctint shapes.

Looking up close, there are some issues that I would most definitely fix next time around. In particular, the gluing of the frame is visible.

In any case, I the way the painting turned out exceeded my expectations, and I am so excited to give it to my sister during Christmas of 2021.