Porcelain tiles are a relatively recent arrival in flooring options for home remodelers, as well as for commercial use. But they have become very popular, for both their durability and the variety of colors and styles available. It is for the latter point that they make an attractive choice for use in waterjet medallions. I would like to share my experience designing waterjet medallions that were cut from porcelain tile, although most of the information I share could apply to medallions cut from natural stone or wood as well, since the waterjet can be used with those mediums as well (and pretty much any other material you might want to cut).
When the opportunity arose for me to design some medallions for the new floor of my church, I was both excited and terrified. It was a huge responsibility, and I was not quite sure what a feasible waterjet design entailed. In other words, I knew the waterjet was an amazing invention, but realistically how detailed could the design be for a floor medallion? With some tips from a designer who had done this before, as well as directions from the waterjet cutting company, I learned a lot about waterjet medallion design.
When you are coming up with the design, it is helpful to think of it as a jigsaw puzzle. The tiles that will be used in your waterjet design will likely be 12 x 12 or 18 x 18 inch tiles if you are using porcelain. Now imagine the pieces of your design being cut from these tiles. If you are creating a two inch wide ring that is three feet in diameter, for example, it will take several cuts pieced together to create the ring. Now think of a small detail in your design, and imagine that it will be a tiny piece of tile set into the medallion as a whole.
As a general rule, you don’t want to create tiny pieces. Porcelain tile is durable, yes, but if you cut it narrow enough it could snap easily. Hopefully when it is in place in its bed of thinset, it will be more stable, but err on the side of caution. The smallest width of the pieces in my design was about ½” . I actually had narrower details in the design, but those were not rendered with waterjet. More on that in a later entry.
As far as what is realistic and feasible for the waterjet medium, think cartoons rather than photographs. Not that you need to have a cartoony looking medallion, but consider that you are working with pieces of tile that butt up next to each other, not an airbrush that can finesse shadows or gradients of color. If you need to have a design with that kind of realistic-looking detail, you would be better off with screen printing the tile.
Here is an example of a medallion design, and then what it looked like when some of the pieces were cut from porcelain tile with the waterjet:
Most waterjet companies can take any drawing/design and put it into their CAD software for the waterjet machines. In my case, I am used to working with Adobe Illustrator, which is a vector graphics program. Originally my designs, which were too complicated, were created in Photoshop, but transferring them to Illustrator helped me grasp the concept of what it would take to make a medallion design that could be cut with a waterjet from porcelain tile.
On the left is the original concept. On the right is the final layout for the waterjet medallion:
The outline of each shape would be the path the waterjet would take in cutting the tile. The solid colors I used in my design represented the individual tile colors that would be incorporated into the medallion.
The process of designing our custom waterjet medallions is pretty involved, but I will try to pull out nuggets of the experience in my future blog entries on the waterjet medallion project.
