2.5D Printing

5Case Studies

There are many opportunities to contribute to manufacturing by creating visually engaging and well‐designed products. Craftspeople, designers and manufacturers have studied the appearance of existing materials, developed methods and sought alternative materials that may mimic their appearance, or they may have simply been inspired by objects and materials to reinvestigate old subjects in new ways. This has often resulted in highly imaginative, convincing and texturally pleasing results. This chapter explores a miscellany of subjects, of which the aim is to: provide a short historical context, contemporary methods that are now being used, visual cross‐overs and comparisons and suggestions for further reading. These case studies demonstrate a survey of printing and reproduction methods used in the past and how many have evolved over time. We have explored ideas, traditional processes and materials that may have been modified or recycled in response to emerging technologies and trends.

Case Study 1: Nature Printing in the Nineteenth Century

In the nineteenth century, Victorians were devoted to collecting ferns, to an extent that in 1855, author Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) introduced the term ‘Pteridomania’ or ‘Fern Craze’ (Loundon, 2015). There are many thousands of different ferns, each family containing subtly varied genus, and these variations were collected as specimens, pressed, dried and stored in scrapbooks. As they were pressed into the pages of the volumes, the ...