I spoke with my son and asked him if there was anything he'd like to make for Father's Day this year. He couldn't think of anything at first, but he really likes puzzles.
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Step 1
As a child, one of my favorite games was Tetris. It was one of those games where the only thing holding you back was practice and determination... Only your own ability was what prevented you from ultimate victory! (Well, that and the extremely fast final levels that felt like you were speeding through hyperspace at warp speed)
In the end, I settled on a puzzle with some special pieces that would spell out "DAD" that could be placed effectively anywhere in the piece if you were clever enough. A few extra pieces, split down the middle painted two different colors, a piece of hinged plexiglass, and you may even have a sort of game where you could compete against your family for who could achieve the most full lines! In fact, maybe I'll do just that. My son, even though it's only 5, sure does love the competition...
So with the preamble ramble out of the way, as I am often guilty of, let's get the project underway. I'll be using the new layers feature in 1.3 to help visually break apart what I'm doing to make it easier to process what I'm describing (since I can't do individual video lessons with all of you in my spare time).
The first thing I wanted to do was come up with a general frame for the pieces to set in. I wanted it to be rounded and gentle on the hands because quite frankly I know my son is likely to be playing with it a heck of a lot more often than I am, and I'm sure that I'll end up having to replace the 3 mm basswood with something more substantial if he sticks with it longer than a week.
Step 2
I started off by pulling out a rounded corner rectangle from the shapes tool and sizing it out to the general size I wanted.
Step 3
I then created a "T" shape out of a couple of rectangle shapes (red layer) which I combined together to form one path and used the Subtract tool from the Combine menu (Combine>Subtract) to remove that shape from the base shape I made originally (blue layer).
This left me with the "U" shape I was looking for, but I wanted nice curves, so I added some circles of the right size (green layer), placed and united them with the base shape (Combine>Unite).
Step 4
After a *tremendous* amount of time and planning (I know it doesn't look like it, but I assure you that if you are building Tetris blocks from scratch and then placing them in perfect accuracy to ensure your pieces will actually fit together at the end of your project... it takes a *lot* of time), I had constructed a basic puzzle of pieces that would fit into the frame comfortably with the DAD pieces. You cannot see it now; however, originally I was going to have parts of the frame sticking out in partial pieces to increase the difficulty. There is one piece in my screenshot here that is a layover from that initial design that was overlooked, but given the nature of Tetris: There are no mistakes, right?! Just put the pieces how they fit!
Step 5
Now was the time to prep the pieces for cutting("explode" them) as well as make a back piece. For the explosion, I merely spaced the pieces out in a more suitable layout (not even the same that they were originally in... if you cut them like that, you're going to have loose pieces, so don't do that unless that's what you want!).
I then created a back piece that can sit behind the pieces and hold them in place. After creating these, I separated all of the elements into separate canvases in XCS to make it easier to manage. You will want to run one job from canvas one and two. Canvas three is just a bunch of extra pieces in case you want to make more than what's there for a larger project. :)
Step 6
A preview of the dry fitting as well as the final project after painting.
As a child, one of my favorite games was Tetris. It was one of those games where the only thing holding you back was practice and determination... Only your own ability was what prevented you from ultimate victory! (Well, that and the extremely fast final levels that felt like you were speeding through hyperspace at warp speed)
In the end, I settled on a puzzle with some special pieces that would spell out "DAD" that could be placed effectively anywhere in the piece if you were clever enough. A few extra pieces, split down the middle painted two different colors, a piece of hinged plexiglass, and you may even have a sort of game where you could compete against your family for who could achieve the most full lines! In fact, maybe I'll do just that. My son, even though it's only 5, sure does love the competition...
So with the preamble ramble out of the way, as I am often guilty of, let's get the project underway. I'll be using the new layers feature in 1.3 to help visually break apart what I'm doing to make it easier to process what I'm describing (since I can't do individual video lessons with all of you in my spare time).
The first thing I wanted to do was come up with a general frame for the pieces to set in. I wanted it to be rounded and gentle on the hands because quite frankly I know my son is likely to be playing with it a heck of a lot more often than I am, and I'm sure that I'll end up having to replace the 3 mm basswood with something more substantial if he sticks with it longer than a week.
I started off by pulling out a rounded corner rectangle from the shapes tool and sizing it out to the general size I wanted.
I then created a "T" shape out of a couple of rectangle shapes (red layer) which I combined together to form one path and used the Subtract tool from the Combine menu (Combine>Subtract) to remove that shape from the base shape I made originally (blue layer).
This left me with the "U" shape I was looking for, but I wanted nice curves, so I added some circles of the right size (green layer), placed and united them with the base shape (Combine>Unite).
After a *tremendous* amount of time and planning (I know it doesn't look like it, but I assure you that if you are building Tetris blocks from scratch and then placing them in perfect accuracy to ensure your pieces will actually fit together at the end of your project... it takes a *lot* of time), I had constructed a basic puzzle of pieces that would fit into the frame comfortably with the DAD pieces. You cannot see it now; however, originally I was going to have parts of the frame sticking out in partial pieces to increase the difficulty. There is one piece in my screenshot here that is a layover from that initial design that was overlooked, but given the nature of Tetris: There are no mistakes, right?! Just put the pieces how they fit!
Now was the time to prep the pieces for cutting("explode" them) as well as make a back piece. For the explosion, I merely spaced the pieces out in a more suitable layout (not even the same that they were originally in... if you cut them like that, you're going to have loose pieces, so don't do that unless that's what you want!).
I then created a back piece that can sit behind the pieces and hold them in place. After creating these, I separated all of the elements into separate canvases in XCS to make it easier to manage. You will want to run one job from canvas one and two. Canvas three is just a bunch of extra pieces in case you want to make more than what's there for a larger project. :)
A preview of the dry fitting as well as the final project after painting.