3D Printed Sugar Skull Stamp

Oh @joshburker, we're doing that sugarskull WeDo spin art project @BPLTeenCentral Library next week! So much fun to prototype with you!

— zackboston (@zackboston) October 23, 2015

Twitter is great at providing collaborative possibilities. After @zackboston and I collaborated around a LEGO WeDo SpinArt 'Bot design, I jumped at the chance to work with her again.

I wanted to play with Tom Burtonwood's idea of 3D printed Play-Doh stamps and the Sugar Skull. I downloaded a good Sugar Skull from Thingiverse and made a prototype stamp. ZackBoston sent me the graphic she uses in her events and I went to work.

First, I created a mask of the skull shape by editing the graphic in Paintbrush and coloring it entirely black.

The mask was easily converted to an SVG with Online-Convert. 

I tried to be clever and invert the skull design in Online-Convert but the conversion lost details. I reverted to doing the work manually with a combination of Inkscape and Tinkercad. 

I wanted the black parts of the drawing to be what gets depressed by the stamp. When I finished my work I had a really awesome looking sugar skull design ready for download.

I downloaded the model and scaled it slightly to fill the bed of my Thing-O-Matic.

The details looked awesome as the first layer was 3D printed.

The finished model printed beautifully.

I put together a roller with a piece of PVC tubing, a welding rod, and 3D printed end caps.

The stamp made an excellent impression.

Try riffing on somebody's idea and remixing it: you both might be surprised by where you end up!

Update: Right after I posted, ZackBoston remixed the design further, using it as a stamp on paper and fabric!

How will you remix the project?