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Flattable Papercut Light
Flattable Papercut Light
by quinzyvarira
Hello again! 2022 is coming to an end. If you are looking for a unique lamp for your holidays home decoration, then this
instructable is for you :D
The bright side of this papercut light:
attable, easy to store when not in use and easy to send as a gift
doesn't need too much materials
you can even made this with your PowerPoint and Excel
you can use this decorative lamp in any occasion by changing the decorative papercut scenery inside the
sliceform
The challenging side of this papercut light: you'll need a lot of patient :D
In this instructable I am going to show you how I made my Flattable Papercut Light.
Supplies:
The di erence between the basic sphere sliceform and the hollow sphere sliceform is in the hollow sphere sliceform
there is a hollow inside the sliceform for the decorative purpose. To make this hollow-sphere, you need to choose the
dimension of the sphere. After that, do some calculations using Ms Excel. You can get a better explanation in this video
by Genie Craft (his calculation was based on MathBits). You can download the Excel le of the calculation based on the
dimension that used in that video here (I added some notes and illustration to get a better understanding).
After working with some numbers and formulas in Excel, let's make the sphere rings. If you are going to use PowerPoint,
you can watch Genie craft's video for the tutorial. I got a little problem here in using PowerPoint 2007 which is older than
what Genie Craft used in his video. Thus I couldn't nd the "Merge Shape", the main feature in this step. So I decided to
make the sphere ring using CorelDraw, and I think you can use an alternative software like Inkscape.
If you are going to use Silhouette software, Papercrafts and other fun things already wrote the tutorial you can follow.
I already try the exact dimension that Genie craft used in the video. You can see the trial template of the hollow sphere
bellow.
The paper I used for these trials was regular 70 gsm HVS, and assembling those rings to make the sliceform was crazily
energy draining.
https://www.instructables.com/FZ2/LJAV/LAZDGLW2/FZ2LJAVLAZDGLW2.pdf
I decided to make a 20 cm diameter sphere sliceform. After some trials with di erent slot number and di erent slot
distance, I noticed that in order to make the hollow sliceform we need to make sure that:
the number of the slots and the slot distance won't exceed the diameter of the ring(especially the
smallest sphere ring)
the slot won't cut o the sphere ring
To display the decorative layers inside, the sliceform need to have an opening or a window by cutting some sphere
rings into a C-form as you can see in the diagram picture.
Since I didn't want to print the design directly on the watercolor paper, so I did a hack. First I printed my sphere rings on a
regular HVS paper, then I placed the HVS paper on the 300 gsm watercolor paper and cliped them together. I always start
the cutting from the smallest part, that was the slots. I cut all the pieces using a cutting pen. Cutting 300 gsm watercolor
paper really need a lot of patient.
Start the assembly from the center ring, and then moving in descending order. After all those HVS trials, assembling the
300 gsm paper was really satisfying.
For the decorative layers inside the sphere, start from the back layer. Insert the bottom slot of the layer to the bottom
cross section of the sphere, and top slot of the layer to the top cross section of the sphere.
Put the papercut sliceform on a round LED base and admire your work! I really think that changing the decorative layers
for other occasions is worth to try, since it's very simple and easy.
Some thoughts
The rst time I made a papercut lightbox was in 2017. At that time I was really fascinated. After that I really want to make
more of this papercut lightbox and sell them, but I got a problem in nding the best 3D frame. Most of time the frame are
aesily broken, and got the problem with shipping caused by glass material (some courier refused to ship glass frame),