Kacie Hultgren’s Titanic deck chair
It’s not just glue gun art for nerds anymore
As additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, is becoming more affordable and accessible, it is similarly seeping into design worlds such as jewelry and miniature furniture and theater set building. Rather than just printing tiny objects for pleasure or decoration, 3D printers are also creating new options for the creative economy.
Jewelry designer Joshua Demonte’s architecturally inspired jewelry looks like miniature wearable city structures crafted for the human body, but the human hand did not play a role in the fabrication. New York-based theater set designerKacie Hultgren uses 3D printing to create miniature objects for imagined interior spaces, something that came about first as a way to create small-scale models of sets for theatrical productions.
“My background is in jewelry design, silversmithing and additive manufacturing,” says Demonte. It sounds like an odd combination, but it’s actually not at all. Demonte’s interest in additive manufacturing began during his sophomore year at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia through a jewelry making class.
“Stanley Lethzian was the head of the program at Tyler back in the 1980s,” he said, “and he was the first academic craftsman to start adopting computer-animated design into the more standard object-based analogue jewelry making craft. Through that program I took many CAD classes and started 3D printing jewelry as an undergraduate.”
Demonte ended up in jewelry at Tyler not because of a passion for 3D printing. He wanted to be an animator, but couldn’t afford those schools. When he got into the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, he chose the craft jewelry program, which was one of the first to start using CAD. In all of his making, however, Demonte learned that his work is based in a craft mentality.
Read the full story on The New Stack: http://thenewstack.io/3d-printing-is-creating-a-new-arts-economy/
