Mysterium Xarxes (Patreon)

Where April surprised me with its busyness, I fully expected May to be work-life balance disaster, and it somehow still managed to be worse. A few things in my personal life combined with a deadline at work to result in very little time (and even less energy) to do any hobby stuff. My apologies to all you guys, especially the new folks who joined at such an awkward time.

I've been so caught up in everything else that I actually missed April's Oathman reward, shown above. Between Oblivion's anniversary in March and the impending release of ESO:Blackwood, The Mysterium Xarxes felt like an appropriate thing to commemorate in print. It was also something that wouldn't take a ton of iteration on the design side (see: little time) but could serve as another experiment with Glowforge-assisted blockprinting.

Although I was quite pleased with the Ayleid ruins print, which was done in wood and acrylic, it was somewhat tough to print by hand since neither of those materials have any give. I'd seen people using special laser rubber to create small stamps, and wanted to see how it'd work out for a bigger print, like a card. If this worked, it'd open up some cool possibilities in regards to text or precise, tiny lines, which are very hard to cut by hand.

The digital side of the project was easy. I took a picture of the book from TIL, erased the extra bits around the sides, and isolated the red outline and black writing in the interior on separate layers. I then sized both way up and brought them into Illustrator, where I used the image trace function to create a vector image that the Glowforge could engrave on the rubber.

It engraved beautifully on the first go. It did generate a whole lot of dust, which, blown across the surface of the block, created a really cool image. Really works with the whole "in a desert of rust and wounds" aesthetic.

Since it takes a pretty long time for an engraving this size, I decided that I'd cut away the remaining exterior material with my regular carving tools. This is where the problems began.

What I did not anticipate is that this rubber is a completely different consistency than the rubber or lino that I usually cut. I could barely make a dent in the material, much less cut away chunks of it, with either the lino tools or a regular box cutter. I gave up pretty quickly, my lesson learned. As a final part of the prep step, I cut some wood backing to reinforce the rubber and keep it from flopping about.

Next, to print. For the red circle, I couldn't use a roller like I normally would with a print, so I resorted to watering down block printing ink slightly and brushing it onto the block. While this was a much slower, more laborious process, it did end up giving the print a cool texture that really worked with the whole "written in the blood of your enemies" sort of look. The black interior was inked with a regular roller.

All in all, this worked exceptionally well. The rubber inked and printed with minimal fuss, and even while cleaning the laser after all that dust was a bit of a pain, I proved that I can do very fine details precisely and easily should future projects require it.

Since this is an extremely late April reward, there is still a May reward incoming as well 👀