One day Kevin was playing with all the different settings in the Simplify3D slicing program he uses to set the parameters for his 3D printers. He found a button he hadn’t played with before in a different setting and thought, “What the heck? Let’s see what happens….”
What happens is a sculpture like his 3D-printed sculpture Amethyst City. Kevin shows small pockets, great shadows, a canyon, “false walls.” He shows the little “hairs” where the 3D printer tried to bridge two upright sections, created by “stringing.” “Is it a really, really old temple out in the middle of a jungle somewhere?” asks Kevin. “Is it a futuristic city on some faraway planet?” He encourages others to see their own stories in his art.
One of the coolest things about this sculpture is its peak, which “disappears” as it rotates. The peak becomes a single plane and just goes away visually. It wobbles a little because the 3D printer was able to print it flat, smooth and perfect. “Wow!,” says Kevin. “A machine that was built for precision can create chaos.”
Next Kevin shows the sculpture Inside Out, another in the series. It has the same kind of deconstructed, organic look, with chaos and precision built into one. The sculpture is so fragile in areas, with just “stringing” across. Some of it’s hard; some of it’s very soft. And light just passes through it.
Kevin has been working on putting lights in his 3D-printed sculptures – a little LED light underneath the artwork helps highlight all the differences and the little nooks and crannies, bringing out the beauty and the chaos.
The next sculpture he shows is called Suni. It’s a little more solid, a little little bulkier. Suni also has some extra little artifacts, or aberrations, in it, including some small loops that weren’t in the original design but that Kevin appreciates.
He shows how, even though the sculpture started out pretty opaque at its bottom, the sculpture thins out to a series of vanes that are pretty translucent. Kevin shows how you can see through the sculpture in that “neck” area but the sculpture becomes opaque again above that in the “head.”
Next Kevin shows the biggest sculpture in this series, Ruby, which is 46″ tall. He points out some of the sculpture’s fascinating details, including a little “curtain” that swoops upward, a bold repeated pattern and an area so lacy you can see right through it.
One of the biggest things Kevin has learned with this style of 3D printing is that it definitely needs the right kind of lighting, whether it’s from above, below or the sides. He is working on some solutions for lighting, but even without it he can sit and look at these sculptures all day. It just has so many nuances.
If you’d like to see more of Ruby and some of the other work that he’s done in this style, definitely come out to https://kevincaron.com . They’re under “fine art,” “3D printing.”
Well, you might want to stick around for another moment to hear Kevin’s outside voice ….