Designing brackets for connecting painting canvas panels to IKEA furniture

My code in OpenSCAD, a programming / scripting language for CAD / Computer-Aided Design.

I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to hang up my art but my house is kinda small and has funky thicc walls – drilling is always a pain, so putting things on the wall is annoying. I’ve been doing a lot of 3d design lately with OpenSCAD and have 3d printed a number of other brackets for holding electronics to shelves, and decided to make my own for the IKEA KALLAX shelving unit that my TV is on. after a few prototypes, this is what I came up with:

Both versions of my bracket
brackets in action, holding up plotted paintings done on canvas panel

If I print anymore then I’d like to increase the width of the parallel pieces, they seem like they could break if they take too much abuse.

I should probably paint them all in the same size / color but overall I am satisfied, this a lot better than drilling holes in my wall and trying to figure out other solutions that don’t damage artwork. I think I might have to use this in my kitchen as well for some shelves, putting light sensitive stuff behind a canvas panel would work pretty well I think.

a bonus: here’s my Christmas gift for my dad, he wanted a Ford Bronco logo mashed up with a T-Rex to possibly use for his 1st gen Bronco rebuild. He doesn’t know if he’s gonna use them since the vehicle is worth more stock, but it was fun to make them. I basically mashed up two pictures in paint, imported into Inkscape to fix lines, then imported into blender and extrude, then import into the 3d printing software and into my 3d printer.

It’s a family of Broncosaurus Rexes hanging out on my desk.

Painting with a pen plotter

I realized that painting with the axidraw API and scanning SVG files was actually pretty easy, so I’ve been trying to rewrite some of my old plotter scripts to work with painting. It works okay for pointillism and long strokes, but short strokes don’t turn out well or just get painted over by the next lines.

The pen drawings near the bottom are mostly for testing https://github.com/jrparadis/plotplot which is a web interface for the axidraw CLI I wrote because I dislike using Inkscape or CLI for basic things like disabling motors.

A lot of these are bit op patterns layered and transformed multiple times. I think I’ve got a bit more experimentation to do – the only one that’s actually new and not adapted from old pen plotting scripts is #4, which is an abstract version of Louis Wain’s Early Irish-Indian Cat xy scanned for closest colors and plotted about 10 times (it’s not suppose to be very accurate, just the basis for something abstract). The current script only seems to get results from really colorful pictures though. Guess I need to keep on trying!

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Categorized as art, tech