Make art at home – why 3D printing is awesome

Published by Oliver on

3D printing is an awesome tool for every maker everyone. You are looking for new decoration? Just print it yourself!
While currently their use might still be a little too complex for some, 3D printers are just irreplaceable if you are looking for individual parts for any DIY project.

One of the first things I actually 3D printed is decoration. One could even call it art. Thingyverse is full of very nice pieces. For example there are great vases like this one or that one. I printed them with very thin walls in vase mode just as decoration. If you are planning to actually fill them with water you need to experiment a little more with the amount of shell layers.

Some decorative vases and a small cookie cutter

Thingyverse and similar sites are full of very beautiful looking small accessoires for your home though. And the best thing is: once you have a 3D printer and couple of nicely colored filaments it only costs you cents and some time to update the look and feel of your home.

As a small bonus: in the picture you can also see one of many cookie cutters I printed for last Christmas. You can find it here.

New decoration for every season

Being able to 3D print new decoration is especially helpful for certain seasonal events. I personally don’t like to spend to much money on getting decoration for something like Easter only to have to store it for most of year.

An easter egg 3d printed on my own printer
3D printing some nice Easter decoration

This year I found this amazing Easter egg collection and 3D printed some of them. Of course you should consider the impact on the environment and don’t waste material but if this decoration is not needed anymore it is easy to get rid of it and maybe create an even better one next time.

If you search the internet for a little while you will find nice 3D models for pretty much any occasion. And you can even customize anything to your liking.

3D printing settings

Here comes the technical part. If you are not the person who will actually do the 3D printing you might want to skip this. If you are it might be really helpful though.

Of course every piece you will be 3D printing is different but here are some general settings I use to print my decorative pieces. The exact names of the settings will vary from slicer software to slicer software, so I will stick to the ones I know from PrusaSlicer and Cura.

If you are trying to print something that has been designed a full body but you only need the outer layers consider using the vase mode. That will make your printer print only the outer shell. Make sure that you can still print without support now though.

If you are printing very delicate pieces or have just a small contact surface consider using a raft or brim to have more surface area.

In case of bigger overhangs or very delicate details you might also need to add supports. I prefer to only generate those that are based on the printer bed. Carefully check in your slicer though where those support are generated. In case of that Easter egg for example the supports would be inside and very hard to remove. They are also not need there at all.

If you start seeing thin webs of filament in your print you might want to check your retraction settings and/or adjust the temperature you are 3D printing at. There are a bunch of stringing test you can print to test for this.

3D printing everything

This is not all that 3D printers can be used for. I am using mine in most of my projects for example for custom cases in my smart lighting system.
I will definitely post more of my printing projects in the future.

Categories: 3d printing