Layered beetles: a tool for turning paintings into laser cut depth
I've been vibe coding an app to bring some three-dimensionality to my girlfriend's beetle paintings, using stacked, laser cut layers of card. The idea is to build depth up around the painted beetle, step by step, so the flat painting becomes a small landscape you can look into.
It starts with a vector. I traced the outline of the beetle from her original painting, and that shape becomes the centre that every layer radiates out from.
Here's the traced outline cut straight from card.
In the app I set the number of steps and the material thickness, then shape the piece with two graphs. One controls the spacing between each step, the other the overall step height, both over the distance radiating out from the beetle.
Changing the curves gives completely different forms: the beetle can rise up like a hill, sink into a valley or sit at the bottom of a tunnel.
Before cutting anything I can look at the whole stack in 3D, then the app exports a separate vector for each layer, ready to send to the laser cutter.
I've also added laser cut pin holes around the edges for easy alignment of the layers. This is the first test, cut from white card.
It was made for the beetles, but I might end up using it for some of my own work too.
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