My friend and Dragons Keep clubmate Kat is a Gilliam Anderson superfan. This makes it incredibly easy to make super special custom gifts for her birthday.
Laser Engraved Gillian Anderson Coasters
On a recent Aliexpress buying spree I bought a pack of 72 plywood blanks for the princely sum of £7.20 so that's 10p each. Measuring 73mm square and 2.3mm thick with rounded corners, they are a perfect size for a custom coaster project. I decided to break the project up into a border and an image so I could take advantage of the speed of an .svg file for the outlines and the variable laser power that comes with a rasterized image.
The Border
This is my first really successful project designing something in Inkscape specifically for the laser engraver and LaserGRBL. The border file was engraved at 20% power and 200mm/minute and each coaster took a little over 3 minutes to engrave.
The Pictures
I assembled a series of 6 images from the internet covering some of Gillian's most famous roles and prepared these in GIMP ensuring that they were scaled to exactly 63mm square. Trial and error ensured that when I imported these images into LaserGRBL I had the necessary 6mm x/y offset to ensure that they were centered inside the engraved square.
These images were then imported as 1 bit Dithered B/W at 15 lines per mm and the engrave settings were 20% power at 500 mm/minute. This meant each coaster took between 30 and 100 minutes depending on the amount of black space in the image.
I could probably have engraved these much faster but I'm still learning how to engrave and I don't mind it taking a little longer rather than having to run multiple passes.
Gillian Anderson truly is a chameleon of an actress.
Bonus Cats
I also added a bonus portrait of each of Kat's two Cats, Bonnie and Clyde for good measure.
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