Controversial Left Shark Artist Now Creates the 3D Printed Hillary Clinton 2016 Meme

You may remember back in February, when Fernando Sosa‘s name was all over the international news after having created a 3D printable meme of the famed “Left Shark” from Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime show. Perry’s lawyers threatened Sosa with legal action if he did not remove his design from Shapeways. After taking the model down and then putting it back up, Sosa decided that he would not oblige to Perry’s lawyers. Hiring a lawyer himself, he went on to create even more models of Left Shark, making them available to whomever was interested in having their own 3D printed version of the meme.

Now Mr. Sosa is at it once again, with his latest release of his Hillary Clinton meme, as part of  what he considers to be a larger project.

“I’m trying to make a sculpture of every presidential candidate running for 2016,” Sosa tells 3DPrint.com. “So it’s only fair that I make one of Hillary Clinton since I already created a figure of Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz.”

Sosa considers himself a liberal, comparing his philosophies to the “1980s Republicans, kind of like Ronald Reagan.” However, he didn’t support Hillary Clinton in 2008 because he didn’t enjoy her close ties to Wall Street. He admits that he still is not overly thrilled with her candidacy, but is supporting her now because he can’t stand any of the other current candidates. With this said, there is no ill will on Sosa’s behalf in creating this meme of Clinton.

Sculpting Clinton

“A while ago there was a meme called #textsfromHillary which gained huge traction on the interwebs,” Sosa tells us. “It pretty much depicts her as a powerful, no games, ‘don’t mess with me’ woman. I was extremely inspired by it and decided to remix it using a jab at people who believe in #emailghazi, aka #emailgate, by adding a huge email symbol on Hillary’s iPhone and by extending her middle finger just a little bit.”

Because Sosa was fairly certain that if he were to make a request to the Secret Service to 3D scan Clinton, he would have been laughed at, he instead decided to use his design skills to model Clinton from scratch. Using tools such as Photoshop and Meshmixer, he spent several days ensuring that his meme would print out with all the accurate details that depict the former First Lady and Secretary of State.

Texturing Clinton’s skin for the 3D print.

For those of you interested in purchasing this 3D printed Hillary Clinton meme, you can do so for just $29.99 on Shapeways. As for Sosa, and his concerns for legal action, he had this to tell us:

“Honestly I never had any issues with 3D printing before #leftshark. During this dilemma — which is not over yet — I found out that lawyers will pretty much come after you no matter how frivolous their claims are. So I like to tell you that I doubt anyone will come after me for copyright, trademark, patent, or right to publicity claims, but I have seen the worse of the system. So, yup I’m always worried about frivolous copyright, trademark, etc claims.”

Sosa tells us that with the Hillary model, he believes that it falls under a parody and that she is famous enough, that her likeness is now public domain.

What do you think about Sosa’s latest creation? Will Hillary’s legal team be coming after him much like we saw in the case of “Left Shark”? Discuss in the 3D Printed Hillary Clinton Meme forum thread on 3DPB.com.