New York City-based artist Shane Hope uses 3D printing to create complex and colorful layered paintings that look just like nano-molecular structures. Represented by the Winkleman Gallery, Hope’s work initially looks like chaos, but is actually a huge tapestry of interwoven pieces that form a beautiful piece of art.
The paintings push the limits of what is possible with low-cost 3-D printers in new and interesting ways, creating techniques that would be more at home with paint than plastic. To create these chaotic pieces, Hope keeps four RepRap printers working around the clock, feeding them with CAD files he has mined from the Protein Data Bank. In order to perfect these files, he first runs Python programming scripts that evolve the models until interesting shapes emerge, which he then hand picks and combines using image editing software.