This is the name tag for Kowalski. It is the actual completion of my 2025 Penguins project. As a whole, I’m happy with how the project turned out. This particular component is one of the weaker ones, but no complaints. I look at it as a weak component because it doesn’t fully meet it’s purpose. It is supposed to be a name tag, however, it is too small for it to be read by people looking at it. I knew it as I made it, but I otherwise liked it, it fit into the motif and if I really wanted something more visible, I could create another name tag hanging below the raft.
The disclaimer
The creation is mostly a product of ChatGPT. I had it design the picture and generate an STL (3D model) that I could print. And, you can see by the result, I did the painting. There’s a lot of discourse around AI around art. I’m mostly indifferent to it. It is an interesting technology and tool. I am fascinated by what it can do, disappointed with the significant limitations and reliability. I have an ongoing set of todo items on my list to understand what is out there, what it can do and what it can’t.
As for using AI on future projects, maybe, maybe not. Depends on what I’m doing. When I was designing my lanterns 3 years ago, I did have an AI (Dalle?) generate a bunch of wild pictures to help inspire me. I’m not an artist. My drawing, painting, coloring, ect. skills are all poor. With some work, they’ll still be below average. Its just how my brain is wired. I do like making things, I’m just not very good at it. If the sign in this project was more prominent, I would have probably used the final picture as a base, traced it, make my own changes and performed my own bas relief shape. But, for the scope of this project, it didn’t make sense.
How it was made – first attempt
create an image of a decorate 2D sign for a mixologist with the name on the sign Kowalski
give it more of an 1920s style look
I liked this, but I needed more of a sign. This is also when I decided going with a machine identification plate on the still body vs something hanging was decided. Through out the Kowalski portion of the project, I went back and forth on the choice.
I started over with: Create an image of a decorate 2D sign for a mixologist with the name on the sign Kowalski with a art deco style. Ensure the picture has a frame. Iconography should use tiki themed images.
simplify
This is still too detailed for the sized item I’m making, but I liked the design to move forward. I knew painting wasn’t going to go well but I also knew the plate was too small to be seen well so none of these choices would really matter.
Converting it to a bas relief, 3D model was shockingly simple: Create a highly detailed bas relief model of the attached image in STL format. The model it created, didn’t look great in the digital tools, but I went ahead and printed it on my resin printer.
The actual print was much cleaner as you can see from the picture. I suspect the artifacts (jagged ness) in the photo above is the slicing software’s optimizations for dealing with a large? STL (17MB). Meshtastic also made an ugly render as well.
Post Print Processing
I needed to warp the sign. Resin prints are horribly fragile, so I used varying strength clamping pressure against a piece of ductwork and applied a heat gun. This worked well.
Painting was rough, but I knew it was never going to look ‘great.’ So, I made a couple of passes to get it good enough before gluing to the lamp.