I designed a metal cutout of me and my parents at the 2024 total solar eclipse, to give to them as a gift the following Christmas. We went to a brewery in upstate New York and made a day of it, waiting for the moment of totality and celebrating together.
Process
The eclipse was spectacular, but of course our original photo didn’t do it justice:
Even the best photo we got was not fit for an art project:
So I recreated the eclipse graphic out of 2D shapes in Blender and patched it in. I also shifted it over to balance the image better. A little fakery is allowed; after all, the phone’s digital photograph is also fakery.
A black/white filter, plus some manual adjustments in Photoshop, gave me this alpha mask, where white means “material’ and black means “negative space”:
I sent that to VINACUSTOM, and they cut it out of a stainless steel sheet with black matte coating. A strong, sturdy decoration to commemorate a preciously fleeting event.
And all that is now
And all that is gone
And all that’s to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon
