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1. Blender Guru, “Blender 3.0 Beginner Tutorial - Part 1”, Youtube, December 2, 2021.
2. See artists Austin Lee and Todam, both of whom create works that transform models drawn in VR into physical objects.
Home
1. Blender Guru, “Blender 3.0 Beginner Tutorial - Part 1”, Youtube, December 2, 2021.
2. See artists Austin Lee and Todam, both of whom create works that transform models drawn in VR into physical objects.
Andrew Price, 3D modeler and Blender tutorial producer, speaks often in his videos about the idea that “imperfection is digital perfection.”1 When 3D modeling, it is usually easier to make something mathematically perfect than something that feels handmade.
For Red Tail, I used Sculptr, a VR children’s game, to create a series of 3D modeled drawings that show my “hand”. The little wobbles from my unsteady movements are captured and baked into virtual shapes, making them unique in their imperfections. It is possible to look at the objects and trace my movements by following the curved lines of extruded coils.
Each model is an adaptable sculpture. When drawing, an extrusion gloms onto existing shapes it comes near to, giving them an organic, clay-like quality. The models created through this process have a distinct look, like melted plastic whose colors blend into each other.
These objects were informed by the way the program allows the user to draw, each mark a long extrusion of a sphere. One drawing features a house on fire, billowing smoke pouring out of its windows. Drawing with these extrusions, I was able to form voluminous plumes that expanded and pinched as they rose into the sky. Another drawing features a flower, whose pistil was scribbled into the middle of ten tube-like petals. One features a huddling mass of wrestlers grappling, each person’s limbs nearly indiscernible from the next.
By creating these sculptures using a children’s game, I aimed to bring physicality, materiality, and my own body’s scale and movements into my virtual art practice. I also wanted to explore how to recreate these materially-informed virtual objects in the real world.2
I created four different physical versions of my 3D objects: a screen print, a pastel drawing, a Risograph booklet, and two 3D-printed sculptures. Each translation into the physical fundamentally shifted the work away from my initial idea. When printing images of the models on the Risograph, the coldness of the digital medium was “warmed”—both through the stippling of the screen and the heavy application of fluorescent orange and yellow inks. When making a large scale screen print of a single flower, my body once again came into play as the pressure I exerted with one arm differed from the other, leaving textures and streaks in the ink applied to the surface of cotton paper.
When translating a model of a house on fire with plumes of billowing smoke above it into a pastel drawing, the once pillow-like digital smoke clouds flattened into a network of individual marks. Finally, the 3D printer left the pattern of layers of plastic melted onto one another, adding a digital-material formal quality to my bodily movements embedded in the forms of the flowers.
There are still hints of the virtual tools used to produce these (now real) objects—the uniformity in the size and shape of coils, the way these coils hold their form and perfectly echo the arc of an arm moving through the air, and the places where these arcs glom onto themselves. I find these to be the strongest moments of the work.