I have seen so many people share their fantastic laser cut shadowboxes that it was both inspirational and daunting to attempt my first one. It’s the kind of exercise that requires a specific type of scene, one where the depth is key and the action is contained within a well-defined location.
It didn’t take me long to come up with the perfect scene, an iconic moment from one of my favourite Studio Ghibli movies, My Neighbour Totoro by Hayao Miyazaki. Totoro, the spirit of the forest, is sleeping in his forest lair when little Mei literally stumbles upon him, and bravely climbs up on his big, squish, furry belly to find out who and what he is. I think it’s safe to say that anyone who has seen the movie has had dreams of having a snooze on Totoro‘s big belly!
This was also the first time I was using reclaimed cardboard (assembling an IKEA kitchen is a great way to have piles of large sheets of thin corrugated cardboard lying around!). I really like the colour and feel of cardboard, and I wanted to play around with it a bit, so this seemed like a great upcycling project for it. I did a few tests on the Glowforge for cutting settings, and attempted some engraving too, with some success.
The design took a while, as the tests had made it clear that I could only achieve a certain level of complexity when cutting cardboard without setting fire to the Glowforge (maker tip: don’t, under any circumstances, set fire to your Glowforge), so it took some trial and error to simplify just the right amount.
Once the settings and the design were ok, I gave it a test run, and the first one was almost perfect. The only tweaks made were to the little bunches of flowers, too fine to survive the laser at the first go. I really like the engraving effect for Totoro‘s markings, claws, nose and whiskers. I popped the layers into a small IKEA frame and it looked really good, with or without the glass on the front. In the end I left the glass in to prevent it getting too dusty and to protect the finer details from accidental damage. I love the end result, and it now has pride of place on a shelf in the living room.
