My wife is teaching summer school and they are doing a unit on Thailand. Part of the unit is studying the animals and elephants are at the top of the list.  I was strolling through the local pet store and came across the following cardboard cutout being used in a display.  Looking at it for a moment, it occurred to me that I could replicate this with my laser cutter and some leftover Amazon packing boxes.

To make this work I first pulled up some profile and head on images of elephants and scaled them to be the same height.

Then I brought them all into Inscape and outlined them by hand with the pencell tool.  A little cleanup later and adding in some slots and I ended up with something like this.

I worked this up as a PDF that is sized to fit on a standard sheet of office paper, as well as a svg that could be imported into light burn. The PDF is designed for students to color and cut out, so I made a test build on cardstock with a very rough cutout and it seems to work well.

A quick bit of testing on my cnc and I came up with a feed rate of 600 mm/min at 80% power and one pass using my Neje A40640 laser module.  I probably could have pushed this a bit faster to save time, but it was not too bad.

I had collected a pile of Amazon boxes for this project, so I went a bit nuts cutting out elephants. In the end I made 14 or so in two different sizes.  The whole project probably took 2 hours from start to finish and it was technically not very difficult.  It is a good starter project if you want to make your own cardboard cutouts.

Here is a link to the pdf file, as well as the svg file if you are interested in cutting out your own elephant.  Your free to do anything you want with these, I claim no rights to the files.