Reddit User Creates Incredible Artwork by Photographing the Insides of 3D Printed Vases

The Exteriors of Martin’s Vases

It’s really incredible what 3D printing is doing to open up artists’ imaginations. We’ve seen so many incredible uses of 3D printing in the field of art that it’s nearly impossible to cover them all. What the technology does is enable the ideas within an artist’s mind to transform into a 3D model on a computer screen, and then appear in the physical world via a 3D printer.

Sometimes art is not pre-planned; instead it’s spawned by an action by its creator which had no artistic intentions whatsoever. Many of the most famous pieces of work initially started out in the minds of artists in a completely different form. This is the case with several pieces of 3D printed artwork created by a man named Joshua Martin, not exactly an artist per se, but his work has created quite the buzz on Reddit this week. The subject of his work? 3D printed vases, but not in the way you are likely imagining.

“I was printing some vases to test how well the Rostock Max V2 would do with a single wall object and at different layers,” Martin explained to 3DPrint.com. “Some are at .2, some .3 mm, etc, to see how it would hold up. After printing some of the vases I was testing how well they would hold water and filled them up. They quickly drained out. I couldn’t see the holes by eye, so I held them above a bright LED lamp I have and noticed how cool the effect was inside of the vase. I quickly started looking for more designs that had a cool effect, preferably smaller at the base, coming up to a wider mouth. This gave them a very cool forced perspective, making them look larger, almost otherworldly, than they really were.”

Martin proceeded to take photographs of his creations with the backlight in place, and posted them on Imgur before eventually sharing them on Reddit. The images that came out were quite extraordinary. In fact, unless you are told what the photos are depicting it would be a stretch for anyone to guess what they actually were. Whether you see a tunnel within a futuristic spacecraft, an alien lair, or perhaps some foreign creature that’s yet to be discovered, Martin’s work sets the imagination wild.

Martin pulled the vase designs from Thingiverse here and here, and made sure to print them with very thin bases in order to let the light shine through adequately. He used a Rostock Max V2 to print them all out. As for the camera and lighting, he simply used his iPhone 6 to take the photographs and a very bright LED light as a backlight.

As for Martin’s future ambitions, he explained to us that he’s “fascinated with the growth of 3d printing” and has been approached by other companies wanting to partner with him on various projects. He also informed us that he has other ideas for projects within the 3D printing space that he will hopefully share in the near future.

Have you done anything similar to what Martin has? Feel free to let us know in the 3D printed Vase Tunnel Art forum thread on 3DPB.com. Check out some additional photos of Martin’s 3D printed vase interiors below.