Em2a Studios

Artist Alley booth T131 over by the Umbrella Corp group. Come say hi! @ Game On Expo

A couple friends recently confessed that they didn’t really know the work it took for me to do what I do. So, here’s a quick snapshot.

It starts with an idea. I wanted to make dice towers. I didn’t really know what makes dice towers do their thing, so I Googled it, poring over hundreds of designs, methods, watched a bunch of videos, flipped through about 20 Instructables, and pilfered through forums.

I wrote 5 hours for this, but I’ve been wanting to do this project for a while and knew exactly where to go to start and am missing a collective 20 hours over the last year and a half. Really, the 5 hours was for focused research and assembly of a one from the Glowforge forum so I knew how they *should* fit together. I loved Jeff’s fold out tray and Dan’s use of serrated tabs, so I borrowed those elements. The clips reminded me of snake fangs, and an idea was born.

The 1st draft took 5 hours from concept planning, to box generation, rudimentary point clean up, 10 minutes of cutting, and about 15 minutes of assembly. I needed to see how everything fit together, which pieces I needed and which pieces I could really do without. I kind of hated how it turned out, but I loved its potential. I decided I didn’t like where the tray hit so low and the teeth didn’t fit in nicely.

The second draft was 2 hours of adjustments, calculations, and then another 10 minutes of cut time with 15 minutes of assembly. Again, being quick and focused on “does this work?”

After being reasonably pleased with how the edits went, the third draft was about 10 hours of clean up, adjustments, file drawing, about 30 minutes for the snake head design, and lots and lots of gluing. I got rid of the “training wheels” tab that I used initially to make sure the lid ended up long enough, and assembled the box parts digitally before blowing it out to cut. Mind you, I was still off, and so the 4th draft took another couple hours of adjustments to satisfy my perfectionism.

That snake took 5 hours to draw each scale by hand. I also then vectorized my drawing, and fit it to each piece. The engrave with the cut took 3 hours.

All in all, that’s 35 hours and 6 sheets of material to make one working box.