Simple sculpture and base

by Rachel Parker-Stephen

An artist friend suggested we work together to make centerpieces for tables at a celebration for our senior pastor, who is a certified yoga instructor. It would be a minimalist portrayal of a person in a seated yoga pose. She provided the profile as a single pen stroke. 

I cleaned up the scanned image and made it more solid black, then imported it as a SVG file into Fusion 360. I extruded it and figured out how large I could make it and still fit into the portion of my print bed that heats well. 

I found that some areas still did not stick well, so I added custom rafts. That helped... then I looked back at my records and found that my temperatures were quite a bit lower than I had used on that filament before. So I brought up the temperature and it stuck even better.

The bottom curves of the design included some flat areas so it would be relatively stable, but it was still easy to knock over. So I designed a round base with tabs that the upright part would snap into with a friction fit. 

That took a little fiddling to get the dimensions right, but I used an old trick of just printing the relevant sample, to save time and plastic.

Here is the finished print. I made 12 sets.

Photo by Chie Chap

And here is the finished centerpiece, with a mandala of leaves and stones on a fiberboard base. They were a big hit at the celebration!