M. C. (Maurits Cornelis) Escher has long been a favorite artist of mine. His artwork is, as wikipedia puts it, “inescapably mathematical,” but was created in a time prior to the advent of modern computer graphics that make the rendering of tessellations trivially easy. Nonetheless, the feat of creating visually appealing and technically demanding art is something that I will always respect and celebrate.
For this project, I found an image of a single lizard and converted it into an SVG using Inkscape. The smart and efficient way to proceed from here would have been to orient them so that they were interlocked and only needed a single pass of the laser cutter to separate them.
I did not do it the smart way. I took the brute force approach, laid nine of them out on a simple grid, and fired away.
That said, the leftover acrylic ended up looking pretty cool.
