workshop – keep hitting the button – At the start of September, I set a goal to press “print” on the average of once a day on the resin 3D printer. I’ve been averaging a bit better than that. Today I believe I pressed time #15 and #16. Most of these prints were failures as objects – bizarre pancakes fused to the vat, abandoned grids of scaffolding sometimes towering above like the landing tower for a deflated blimp. Instead of product, my goal was process, to get myself feeling more confident with this tech.
I pursued a similar strategy back in June with the router. I hated the noise of the router. I despised the cloud of wood dust it kicked up. I feared the way it cut so goddamed well that the merest touch could mess up whatever I was working on. AND I also knew that it was the right tool to make frames. I paint on oddly sized scraps of wood and it is impossible to find frames off the shelf to fit them. I have come to believe that a frame is pretty necessary to help folks understand how to look at my paintings. I’m monkeying with the dimensions and subject matter; the comfort of a frame allows viewers a bit of reassurance. (Digression: My interpretation of Sonic Youth, one of my favorite bands from the 80’s and 90’s is that for all their weird experimentalism, at least two of the members played something intelligible at any given moment and that struck me as pretty genius and as a kindness to the audience.) Back in June, it took just a week before I knew how to cut a pretty darned good rabbet and then, how to add a nice decorative edge to a piece of wood. Within 10 days I was able to make a frame that custom fit any of my tiny paintings.
And pretty soon I realized that I would never get fast enough at making frames, even with off the shelf molding, to make it cost effective to frame my little 3″ x 4″ paintings, especially since I planned to give them away for free, possibly chargin $10 for the frames. I then thought I might cast frames in resin… and then two-part resin prices when crazy during the lockdown. And to be honest, the kind of frame that I wanted to make would require a two part mold which would add just a bit more complexity than I wanted.
About this time, I discovered resin based 3D printing. I’d messed around with filament based 3D printing probably a decade ago and it felt not ready for prime time. The resolution and the print times in particular bugged me. Resin printing is far smoother and with the right kind of printer, it’s far faster.
I purchased the Anycubic Photon Mono X printer and the Wash/Cure station during a summer sale. I am very happy with the purchase. I gamified my 3D printing education by positing different “levels” and the tangible goals that would prove I’d “leveled up.” I’ll write about those later. Anyway, today, I took a free .stl file from the interwebs, made an attempt at slicing it into a format my printer could understand and tried printing. This was technically second level work. I’d tried printing the Venus of Willendorf earlier and both my attempts failed. (I suspect I need to hollow out the model which is a 3rd level skill) The cool thing is that the .stl I used today was for a baroque frame. It printed in about 36 minutes and came out passable well, so I hit print again just before I went to my side hustle. (I was dishes for my partner’s pie business.) If I wanted to be precise, both frames are slight failures due to some delamination between the base and detail levels. It happened on both prints which makes me think I need to inspect that model again. However, the BOTH look like frames and could very easily function like a frame so I count them as successes.
My hall of successes: the AnyCubic Cube in clear plant-based resin, the Loot Studios Santa Claus and base (two print jobs) in clear plant-based resin and now TWO slightly decrepit baroque picture frames. 5 successes out of 16 prints. I have saved all the failed prints and am going to assemble them into a monument to perseverance.