Keychain

Keychain Reflection 

My inspiration for this project came from a very old keychain of a dog that my family once had. It was on the same ring as our house key so whenever I came home I would see my mom pull it out and then open the door. I really liked the design of the keychain which is why I've tried to recreate it with my new keychain: A dog with a funny sticker on the background.

Materials: Wood, Sticker Material, and sandpaper

Equipment: I used the Fusion 3D printer as well as the Epilog printer, along with both my computer and a school computer.

Software: Adobe Illustrator and the stuff needed to use the printer were the only programs that I personally used.

For my first Illustrator design, I followed the steps that Mr. Supiro told us, by first cutting out my image, adding the area that I wanted to be engraved, and then adding a hole to put the key through. For my sticker design, I flipped the entire thing and put an image inside of it, however, I used the wrong pink so I had to use an exacto knife in order to cut it out. However, I have since fixed that and have an updated version of my design.

The thing that went well in this project was the first wooden design that I made, which was made quickly and without any error, as well as being aesthetically pleasing. Generally speaking, I think I did a good job of making my design look good overall. Using the software was also easier than I thought it would be, given that I have previously struggled with using Adobe Illustrator. It's a very good program but at first, it's hard to use, but now that I understand it more any projects we do in the future will be much easier.

Something that was challenging was correctly printing out my project, I used the wrong pink and had to cut it out with an exacto knife instead of just being able to have the 3D printer do it for me. Also challenging was tracing out the dog in the beginning, as if it's not cut perfectly it won't look like a dog but fortunately I took my time and it turned out pretty good. The worst thing was that previously mentioned exacto knife however, I was under time pressure while cutting and the sticker material wasn't exactly easy to cut through so that didn't go very well and it led to some rough edges.

Overall I think that I did everything that I needed to do decently and I wouldn't change much apart from not making the mistakes I did with the benefit of hindsight I would also try and get to the printer early as I spend some 1 1/2 class periods just waiting for the printer to be opened up so I could use it. I'm satisfied with the overall result however and I wouldn't adjust anything design-wise.

Earlier designs in Adobe Illustrator

Printers used (Epilog for sticker and Helix for wooden side (see below)