CNC Plasma Cut Metal Art - What Kinds of Shapes are Possible?
Decorative Shapes:
CNC plasma cut metal art, sometimes referred to as “wall art,” has always been very popular among CNC plasma table operators. Most of the metal art shapes one sees on-line are artistic representations of common objects.
Weathervanes, fireplace screens, mailboxes, gates, coffee tabletops, etc. probably account for over half of what’s out there. Other items commonly produced are caricatures of celebrities, landscape scenes with various animals, and holiday-oriented pieces.
Some of these shapes are intricate and contain large repetitive numbers of curlicues and scrolls. Others are quite simplistic, with only a basic solid silhouette.
There are a number of methods by which the plasma art community goes about creating shapes for cutting. There is a tendency to look for the easiest approach, which doesn’t necessarily produce the best result.
With all the photos of others’ work displayed on-line, it is no wonder that a great deal of pirating of shapes goes on. There are a lot of reasons not to do this.
First, there isn’t much satisfaction in producing a piece that someone else designed. The hard part is planning and configuring a shape so that it satisfactorily executes. It doesn’t take much in the way of imagination or intelligence to push a button and have a machine cut something out.
Second, once you have the shape creation process down cold, it is probably quicker and easier to generate a shape from scratch than to scan it and spend hours trying to get the imperfections and unworkable geometry out of it.
Third, while it is quite hard to enforce copyright compliance, it is illegal to duplicate someone’s protected work. Just when you have invested a lot of time, energy, and possibly money into mass producing a piece, you could be shut down by legal action.
CNC plasma cut metal art example - Haunted Castle
This is not to say that you shouldn’t use non-copyrighted material for your shape cutting if it suits your needs. The Internet is teeming with non-copyrighted clip art geared toward holidays, sports, automobiles, animals, etc. A lot of this stuff can be scanned and converted into a vector image your computer understands.
CorelDraw, for example has an auto-trace function that will trace a crisp image against a white background. It will then allow you to export it as a dxf file for your cut software. A good photograph of an object against a contrasting background can easily be manually traced with the tools provided in CorelDraw.
To summarize, it is recommended that you become familiar with all methods of scanning, tracing and creating shapes. However, there is no substitute for a good drawing program and a thorough knowledge of how to use it.
