Laser Cutting Papel Picado for Día De Muertos

In this Instructable, I'll show you how I designed and cut these sheets of papel picado on my laser cutter to decorate for my family's celebration of Día de Muertos.

Papel picado is a traditional Mexican craft performed by cutting complex designs out of layered sheets of tissue paper. As with most things that are traditionally done one way, when you have a laser cutter you find yourself inspired to use it instead. That’s not to say this is a better way – in fact, I’d argue that hand cut designs are far more impressive than having a machine do it – but since I’m far better at digital design than I am pen-and-paper design, I'll be using my laser, and showing you my process here.

If you'd rather watch a build video before jumping into the Instructable, be sure to watch the full video above. If you like it, please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel so I know this is the type of project people enjoy learning how to make themselves so that I can make more projects and videos like it in the future!

The materials for making these sheets of papel picado are pretty basic. Just some colorful printer paper and some string. You'll of course also need vector files of the designs you want to cut and access to a laser cutter – I have my own, but for years used the one at my local maker space, and if you're located anywhere near a decent sized city, there are likely similar maker spaces near you that you can join. Many universities and libraries also have lasers that may be available to you!

Tools Used

• Laser cutter
• Hole punch (I decided later to add my holes, but these can be cut on the laser too)

Supplies

• Colored Printer Paper
• Twine / String
• Vector Papel Picado designs

For the design of the sheets I'd end up cutting, I started by researching papel picado designs that I liked to get a feel for what I liked in various designs. The first few I made were done by basically tracing photos of ones I had found and liked using Adobe Illustrator.

After I got a feel for what I liked with the first few, I tried my hand at a making a few completely custom designs. The green eagle sheet in the photo above is one such example – eagles aren't traditionally used in papel picado designs, but my father-in-law passed away this year, and he loved eagles, so I thought I would make that one to honor him.

If you're not quite up for custom designing papel picado templates and, you can find some free files online or buy them from a stock vector site like Creative Market or even Etsy.

Before we get started cutting our fancy colorful paper, let's use some basic white printer paper to dial in our settings. Regardless of what kind of laser cutter you'll be using, the power requirements here will probably be super low, so I started there.

For my first test cut, I cut one sheet at 100% speed and 5% power, with high speed air assist on my laser turned off so that the paper stayed in place. This cut through perfectly fine without any trouble, so I tried cutting 5 sheets at a time without changing the settings.

This cut through fine as well, but I observed that there was a small amount of brown burnt residue that got trapped between the layers of paper, and it didn’t rub off easily. Since this wasn’t a problem with the individual test sheet, I imagined this was due to the laser vaporizing the additional material and it getting trapped in the tiny air pockets between the pages.

Still wanting to cut multiple pages at once to save time, I decided I’d split the difference and cut 2-3 sheets at a time to minimize that residue. I also determined that the residue probably wouldn’t be as visible on the colored paper as it was on the bright white printer paper. Besides, these aren’t going to be observed close up – they’ll be strung on a string and hung up above head-level in most cases, so a little burn residue on the edges shouldn’t matter.

Next up, the fun part! Cutting your designs into the colorful paper! If you cut multiple colors at one time, it's super fun to watch, as tiny pieces of paper get flung about and the laser is basically making confetti.

For paper, I used a type I found at my local Target called "Astrobrights" and was really pleased with the variety of bright and vivid colors that were also culturally appropriate for Día de Muertos.

After cutting your sheets out and removing them, it's easiest to clean your cutting bed with a shop vac, rather than trying to remove all the scraps of paper yourself.

Once all of your sheets are cut, it's time to string them up and make a banner! You'll want to lay out your designs in the order you plan to hang them from your string. It'll look the best if you can alternate colors and patterns, trying not to have too much repetition.

With your order determined, you can "thread" the sheets onto your string, one by one, with the string entering the hole on the left of each sheet, coming around the back out through the right hole, and repeating this on each one.

If you don't want to use holes to mount them to the string, you can fold over the top edge of each sheet and tape them to the string, but the hole method is nice and quick, and gives some adjustability once hung up.

After they are all threaded, you can carefully secure one end of the string to the wall (or wherever you plan to hang your papel picado banner), followed by the other end. If you used the hole method to mount, this is also a good opportunity to adjust the spacing of each sheet to make sure everything appears even.

I'm publishing this Instructable a few days before Dia de Muertos, but the day and night of, we plan to make some “pan de muerto”, a sweet, orange-flavored traditional Mexican bread that is made for the celebration. We’ll also be serving foods that our departed family members enjoyed, and telling stories about them and their lives as we share the meal with them in spirit.

I hope you enjoyed my write-up about this project! Be sure to watch the video above for more details, and if you like it please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel for more projects like this.