I found some cool laser cut maps on Pinterest, but for $200 I wouldn't be buying any anytime soon. Instead, I decided to put my Adobe Illustrator skills to work and decided to make my own. Thanks to the Engineering building on campus, I had access to a laser cutter for an affordable price, about $45 after paying for the wood and the labor.
I started with creating the outlines of every layer, and the whole document looked like this:
I had a lot of trouble getting the program to recognize the text and roads as something I intended to be etched into the wood, so instead I had to print using a method I learned from college: transferring ink from a piece of paper onto the wood. The finished effect is what you see at the beginning of this post.
The wood was a little thicker than I intended and as such made it very heavy and deeper than I would have wanted. But I'll definitely make more, especially of Newberry Crater. I have a few family members that want their own. Learning experience!
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