How to Create a HoneyComb Coaster Using LightBurn

As I often say, “You can never have enough coasters”. In this tutorial we will cover how to create a honeycomb coaster using Lightburn. Now these look great on the table and you can paint them to match your decor.

Watch the video below or scroll down for written instructions

Let’s start by going to the Hexagon or the Polygon Tool in the menu bar.

Click on the icon and hold the shift key while you draw the shape.

If you don’t hold the shift key you’re going to get a distorted shape, so make sure that you hold the shift key down while you do this.

Now we want to rotate the shape, and to do this, select the Select Tool.

When you hover over the corners of your shape you will get a curved Arrow that allows you to rotate the hexagon. If you hold the shift key down while doing this it will click nicely into place.

I want to turn it enough so that the points of the hexagon run vertically as you can see in the photo below.

Next I’m going to resize the shape. But before I do that I’m going to change the setting to inches, simply because I like working in inches.

So you just click on this option here to change the inches. You can work in mm if your prefer.

I’m going to make my shape one inch wide by typing 1 in the width field.

We are going to need some more of these shapes, so I’m going to use the Grid Array Tool to do that, and that’s on the left hand sidebar.

When you click on it you get a pop-up, and what I’m going to do is change the X and Y rows.

I’m going to go with seven columns and seven rows. At this point in the video I incorrectly entered 6 rows but we did correct it later in the video. So just make sure you enter 7 columns and 7 rows.

You can see the rows have gone upwards I want them to sort of come downwards just to make it easier here .

And I do that by just reversing Direction.

And this is what we have on the screen so far.

I want to create some spacing between the hexagons so I come over to the X spacing and I’m going to go with 0.2in.

I’ happy with that but you can move the up and down arrow to create greater or lesser spacing, but I’m just going to go with the 0.2.

I’m going to leave the Y spacing for now because what I’m going to do is to go Shift by Half and select that to see what happens.

You can see now it’s shifted across which is just exactly what we need.

Now I’m going to bring up the Y spacing until I get the spacing all looking the same.

I actually need another row there I wanted seven so that’s fine so I’ll add that so that I have seven columns seven rows.

Once I’m happy with how it’s looking I’m going to go okay.

What I need to do next, is remove some of the shapes as I don’t need them all for my coaster.

• On the first row I only need four across so I’m going to delete the first shape. Select the shape and press the delete key on the keyboard. I’ll also delete the second shape and the last one in the row.
• On the next row I need five shapes, so I delete the first shape and the last one.
  On the next row I need six so I’m just going to delete one shape.
• I need seven shapes for the next row so I’m going to keep all of those.
• Then I need back down to six again in the next row, so I’m going to delete the first shape.
• Reduce the next row down to five shapes, so delete the first one and the last one.
• On the last row I only need four shapes so remove the first two and the last one.

And this is what our coaster looks like.

Next we want to group these rows all together, so just click and drag from the right hand side to select everything, right click and select Group.

I want to add an outline the coaster. This will be the shape of the coaster.

To do that I’m going to select the Offset Shapes Option in the menu.

Click that option and it automatically adds an outline.

I’m going to make it 0.2 so that it matches the inside line that I created around the individual shapes previously.

The options available are outward or inward or both. I’m going to choose outward, and Corner style.

Now if you wish, you can choose a round or a bevel shape. I think the beveled is barely noticeable, there is a slight difference but not much.

The corner that I’m going to go with is a sharp sort of shape.

We don’t have to change anything else there so we select OK.

Once again we need click and drag from the outside to select everything, right click and group.

Okay, so that is actually complete and all we need to do now is change the width or the sizing of this.

Coasters are around four inches so they tell me, so I’m going to change the width up in the width and height section to four inches.

Okay so my honeycomb coaster is ready to go.

Now you can paint these to match your decor, you can have them as single coasters and you can glue a number of them together to make a centrepiece.