Here's the machine:
Basically it's a motorised scalpel that cuts patterns designed on a vector graphics program. Pretty nifty and useful for all sorts of things. Now, in this case, it only really cuts materials up to 1mm or so. For this I'm using 0.5mm plasticard in black. I didn't really need to do this, but the surround I'd previously cut out freehand (which was much harder than it felt like it should have been) was in white PVC foam which I then spraypainted black. It was only ever meant to be a temporary measure but the paint had rubbed off much faster than I thought it would and then it cracked. Boooo. You can see the thin white prototype below next to the old surround I'm replacing.
So 0.5mm is a bit thin on its own. So what I do is cut several copies of the exact same shape and laminate them together using thin polystyrene cement. As the machine is so accurate they all come out pretty much exactly the same, give or take a few frayed edges.
Now, stupidly, I totally forgot to set it to cut twice in the options, so it only ran over the basic shapes once. With plasticard this can be a bit of a bitch if you haven't put guidelines on the template; plasticard can be scored and snapped easily enough if it's straight geometric shapes but not so easily if you're doing rounded shapes like boobs. It can be risky to bend and snap the inner sections but it all worked out fine. As it happens, I had the machine cut eight copies but I only ended up laminating four together as it had already started to feel quite sturdy after that.
I filed the edges down and then painted the top of it with gloss acrylic. Pointless and it ended up looking like a bag of shit, really. Oh well, doesn't look bad from far away. And it doesn't really matter if the gloss comes off because it's still black underneath. Like your mam.
Ta-da. Turned the flash off because I'm an idiot.
