From drawing to figure

It does not start with plastic, it starts with a window on a screen. In October 2020 that window held a yellow wall panel, tilted in space, with six rectangular openings cut into it. Next to it, the view the slicer gives me: the same panel taken apart into layers, red, orange, green, plus the supports you snap off again later. Up to that point everything is still free. You can move things, mirror them, throw them away, and none of it costs material.

The printer keeps its own rhythm

Once the print starts, things slow down. A larger panel builds up layer by layer over hours, and there is nothing to do but watch. I like watching anyway — the head runs its paths, and halfway up you can already see whether it will hold or whether a corner is lifting off the bed.

In November two yellow columns stood on the black print bed, one finished, the other barely two centimetres tall. Round parts are delicate: the layers are offset by tiny amounts, and if the first layer does not sit properly the whole thing topples somewhere in the middle. You usually only notice a failure like that when you come back an hour later and find a tangle of filament.

So what really costs time in 3D printing is not the printing. It is the attempts. Temperature, bed adhesion, wall thickness, supports in the right places. Every try takes hours, and you are wise to change only one thing per try, otherwise you will never know what actually fixed it.

The figure

By March 2021 the figure was standing there. White, slightly translucent, considerably larger than the original, with cap, jacket and those unmistakable hands, on a round base with a box lid behind it as a backdrop. On its own it looks rather like a plaster model.

It only gets interesting with light inside it. The translucent material spreads the glow softly across the whole body, and because the walls vary in thickness nothing lights up evenly: the arms brighter, the torso deeper, the eyes as two clear points. In red it looks like a warning lamp, in blue cool and calm, in yellow almost like a small lamp for a shelf. Four pictures, one figure, four completely different moods.

That five months sit between the first drawing and that evening says most of what there is to say about this hobby. Other things were printed in between, set aside, picked up again.

The files are on this site under 3D printing, free to download. If you try them: count the first two attempts as practice.