3D Printing/ Printmaking with Latin American Designs

This collection is hopefully an inspiration for young designers and artist to use designs and motifs from Mexico, Peru, Panama, and Guatemala. This collection shows you a pathway to create designs based on these motifs and artwork to use in 3D printing using  Morphi and other tools to create prints using relief printing making techniques. (This lesson is more focused on 9-18 year olds, but can be adapted for older students, as well as adults with some rewriting and restructuring. I also have run the printmaking section with younger students, but with the 3D relief plates already being printed, or facilitated by adults, teachers, or parents to help them with the process so as to make it a successful lesson. )

 You will be creating and studying these cultural artifacts to gain insight into how they were constructed, drawn, and fabricated. Ours of course are totally opposite of how these fabric fragments and other examples were constructed, but they can help a student (and yourself ) gain insight into the process that these cultures used to created these designs, art and patterns within the drawings. In order to gain perspective on these cultures, the research your students use by viewing and constructing their own designs will give agency to their work, albeit through the eyes of these ancient craftsman, designer, and artist. The students will gain a new understanding and vision of these cultural motifs and what they carry to the viewer.

Students will be creating and researching geometric designs and motifs based on ancient to modern patterns from Peru, Mexico, and other areas. Once they have constructed and drawn an idea either through digital or non-digital means, they will be rendering their designs in Morphi or another 3D modeling app. Here is a link to a design I did specifically for this lesson on Youmagine that you can use with your prints, as well as your students.

The students will then export these files to be 3D sliced for the printer. I suggest using Cura as this is my go to software for getting digital files ready for the 3D printer. Depending on your press, I suggest making the geometric design small and thin enough that they fit in your print bed, so you might need to resize the design in Cura. If you do not own press, you can use tools to do relief prints like you would any regular printmaking project.Iif you have access, you can use the OpenPressProject to print your own, which I highly recommend as it is my preferred method that I printed my designs in the last resource of this collection.

The inking process should be similar to regular relief printmaking, depending on your students design complexity, and you can experiment with texture, motifs, multiple plates, etc. based on the  resources that are in this collection.

Happy Printing!

#LatinoHAC