The badge

A fandom of creativity

The furry fandom is infamous for being an expensive one to be in. You need to pay for artists, makers and creators to make your vision of an anthropomorphic you; and it ain't cheap.

I have been involved actively for a good couple years now. From the start I've been on the artist side of the fandom exchange. Funnily enough, I think I've commissioned formally artwork maybe twice; and have done some collabs. However, I have done probably close to the hundreds, if not in the triple digit art pieces along the way. I currently live off artwork (of which I am thankful of, however small it is).

As you can tell from the tone of previous posts, I had a pretty negative and pessimistic view on this matter. I've suffered from envy towards people with fursuits that can go to furcons for so long, it intoxicated me from deep within.

I need to turn my skill issues into skill advantages.

Skill advantages

I happen to be a fully-certified architect that has some severe PTSD from working within the industry after 8 years of college and 1 year of post-graduate work. We had to do cardboard models of our projects, and I hated it both in principle and in practice. There's much much better visualisation techniques out there that are more gentle with this dying planet. However, Mother Nature is on a tug-o-war between it and architect's ego. You know the end but there's a whole season in between.

Even though I ended up leaving in part of this... you never un-learn these skills. And turns out, I did have some skills left over from this little dark age.

Mainly: cardboard modelling, and laser-cutting. I did my final thesis models using that technique, therefore I had enough experience to know what I needed to do to get something sorted.

I also had a lot of remaining cardboard from that time. It's been over a year since its been rotting away in a closet. Might as well give new life to that dead tree.

Build process

Vector drawing.

Laser cutting is basically a fancy CNC machine that has a laser. It can cut through various kinds of materials, like cardboard. You can do pretty complex designs with it.

To start, you need to get used to vector drawing. What you draw is what you get. These machines have two power settings: etching and cutting.

You can do this on any vector drawing software that exports to the specific machine's software (usually DXF). The most important thing is separating the etching and cutting layers and labeling them accordingly. Some providers will ask you to name or colour layers a specific way so machines know what you want from them.

Send this to any provider with a laser cutter (I used @amaqueta on Instagram, thanks!) and there you go.

Assembly

...turns out I got all pieces all mixed up on a bag. I didn't account for the little pieces to be small enough to fall through the CNC machine's bed. So, away I went assembling them by hand.

You can see in the video above a bit of the process. Sadly I didn't make a full video on it, but here's the gist of it.

• The design was made so pieces were duplicate to give it depth. It made the whole design a lot more interesting and intricate.
• At the last minute I added a "cape" for the signature at the side. I'd be awkward to have a badge without identification of who's wearing it.
• It took me 8 hours to build. Mainly because I did not plan for a lot of stuff.
• I put a hook inside the design, repeated on several layers, to strengthen the hook between the badge and the lanyard. It has three (!) layers of double-sided cardboard. It's not gonna fall off.
• It's not coated. Just because I could no source a good sealant before the event and didn't wanna chance it with wood glue.

So... why?

Because I can.

I firmly believe that you don't need a fursuit to be a furry. And, at the same time, the fandom is an outlet of creativity. The fandom needs a lot more creative ways of expression beyond the usual fursuits, and maybe even beyond electronic fursuits. For us furs that are not part of the mysteriously wealthy fur tribe, this is my statement of both rebellion, spite, and creative thinking.

Thanks for reading <3