Using 3D Printing To Extend Traditional Techniques
(Or: How to Cheat, Hack, and Go Full Frankenstein With Your Art, Sculptures, and Mixed Media Until Even Your Ancestors Are Jealous)
Let’s rip off the polite band-aid right now: 3D printing is not “the death of traditional art.” It’s the next evolutionary step in the artist’s survival playbook—a forbidden marriage between old-world craftsmanship and unhinged digital wizardry. If you think real artists should only touch clay, canvas, or chisel, and that “digital” means “fake,” you’re exactly the person who needs to read this.
3D printing doesn’t replace hand skills. It extends them. It turns good ideas into monsters, lets you remix the classics, and hands you new ways to break, bend, and rebuild whatever the hell you want. And if you’re a starving artist? Get ready for doors you never thought you’d kick open.
This is the real, raw, confessional survival guide to dragging your art—screaming—into the 21st century, and doing it without apology or the scent of plastic still clinging to your hands.
1. Why 3D Printing Scares the Purists (And Why That’s Bullshit)
Every time some gatekeeper sniffs and says, “But is it really art if a machine does it?”—an actual artist somewhere just laughed and printed a ten-foot tentacle.
Michelangelo would have murdered for a resin printer. Brâncuși would’ve printed and welded his own damn columns. Duchamp would’ve downloaded someone’s toilet, scaled it up, and pissed everyone off even more.
Here’s the dirty secret:
3D printing is just another brush, another chisel. If you use it right, you’re not just copying—you’re creating at a scale, speed, and complexity that used to be science fiction.
2. Step-By-Step: Merging 3D Printing With Traditional Media
A. Sculpt, Model, or Steal Your Base Form
Start with clay, wire, wax, whatever: Scan it with a cheap phone app, turn it into a digital model.
Model from scratch in Blender, ZBrush, Tinkercad: Clunky is fine. Janky is authentic.
Download open-source models: Remix, mash up, or “Frankenstein” them with your own tweaks.
B. Print Your Bones (or Sins) Into Reality
FDM printers: Great for chunky, blocky, or test runs. Think skeletons, armatures, base forms.
Resin printers: For detail so fine it makes your brushes jealous. Print faces, intricate jewelry, hands, monsters.
Ingredient hack:
Print in “draft” mode for under-structures. Print the details separately and glue them on later. Layer your own textures with gesso, clay, even latex.
C. Combine With Old-School Techniques
Carve into prints: Sand, cut, Dremel, melt. Treat that plastic like it owes you money.
Prime and paint: Acrylics, oils, inks—plastic takes all of it if you sand and prime right.
Add materials: Attach printed parts to wood, glass, stone, metal. Mix old with new until it’s all unrecognizable and gloriously unique.
D. Mold and Multiply
Make silicone molds from your prints: Cast in plaster, resin, bronze, even wax for lost-wax casting.
Hand-finish every cast: No two pieces will ever be alike, even if the bones are printed.
3. Ingredient Hacks: Dirty Tricks and Unholy Unions
Print textures: Print objects with rough, stone, or fabric-like surfaces for extra tooth.
Leave layer lines: Sometimes those “imperfections” look better than you ever planned—let them show through paint or glaze.
Hybrid tools: Print custom stencils, texture rollers, stamps, or armatures for your traditional sculpture or painting.
Survival strategy:
If a print fails? Sand it, burn it, break it, pour resin over it, or use it as a mold for something new. Never toss out the “ruined” prints—they’re the best for Frankenstein work.
4. Confessions From the Trenches
My first 3D-printed sculpture looked like melted Lego—layer lines everywhere, a nose like a deformed potato. I sanded, glued, smeared it with clay, and painted over the mess. It ended up in a gallery because it looked like something that shouldn’t exist.
Now, I print all my under-structures—bones, base shapes, mechanical bits. Sometimes I print a weird stamp, press it into wet clay, and then break the stamp just to make sure no one else can copy it. The line between “digital” and “traditional” is a lie.
5. Survival Strategies for the Budget-Busted
Buy used. Check Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, or the graveyard of failed Kickstarter dreams.
Team up with other artists. Split the cost, share machines, barter models for prints.
Libraries, makerspaces, schools—any place that will let you get your hands on a printer. Use them before you buy your own.
6. The Final Dare: Break the Rules, Print the Impossible
If you want to extend your traditional technique—don’t just print “finished” pieces. Print bones. Print chaos. Print mistakes and secrets and new weapons. Use the machine as a tool, not a crutch.
Because the best art isn’t one or the other.
It’s the collision—of clay and code,
of hand and machine,
of tradition and pure, unholy innovation.
Go print your monsters,
and make something nobody else could ever imagine.