Making large cutout signs

Making a large cutout sign is quite fun actually. Today we made a large cutout of a guy on on snowmobile. Here is how we did it:

First of all we had to make the file in photoshop. We took an image of a snowmobiler and sized it up to one fourth of the correct size as 300 dpi. The size of the cutout was going to be 8 Feet Tal by 16 feet wide.

After sizing up the image to the correct size. I used a photoshop brush with a lot of randomity and drew around the snowmobiler, I used what I drew to make a mask of the image. once that was done I was able to send it to the print rip software. After that I set the tiles for 59 inches each and sent the file to the printer.

After the file had finished ripping (Raster Image Processing) and printing, we took each of the printouts and laminated them onto half-inch Gatorboard. Then we took a Router with a cutting bit and followed the shape. To have a good surface to cut the shape out, we had to put the gatorboard pieces on a thick piece of foam so that we could just use the router without worrying about what was underneath getting destroyed.

The final thing we did was lay all 3 of the pieces out side by side and made sure that they looked like one piece. Here you can see the final sign (its actually 3 pieces, put together):