Vincent Van Gogh once said, “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”
Clearly, Ayush Wadehra, who is going into fourth year as a Mechatronics student, took his love of Van Gogh and courage to technologically create an award-winning 3D printed version of The Starry Night – 131 years after the original was painted by Van Gogh, while living in isolation, in an asylum, in June 1889.
This 3D version has moving parts.
Wadehra entered and came first place in the post secondary category competition, Extreme Redesign, an annual 3D printing competition open to students globally. The competition is sponsored by, Stratasys – a 3D printer and materials company. Extreme Redesign “invites students to design an original piece of art, jewelry or architecture, or to make an existing design better”. He competed against 139 projects to win. The winners were all different types of objects.
One of the comments on The Starry Night project was, “Impressive way to make something that you can't do using other applications. Art is normally made on a natural material, and movement was added. Would be great to see this printed on a professional printer that utilizes soluble support to
Wadehra says, “my primary inspiration for this piece was my desire to blend Engineering with Art. I think that many people see the two as completely separate when in reality they share many common traits, and I feel that many great minds, such as Leonardo da Vinci or Vincent van Gogh are able to see these similarities and vividly express them through their work. I was inspired to take van Gogh’s fusion of engineering and art one step further, by adding gears to the night sky. This would take the perceived movements of the heavens, depicted in the painting using luminance and short brushstrokes, and translate it into actual movement!”
The Starry Night has always been one of my favourite works of art, not only for its beautiful brush strokes or ethereal portrayal of the night sky, but also for its scientifically accurate characterization of principles such as turbulent fluid flow or luminance.
Details of the technical challenges Wadehra had creating The Starry Night in 3D Printing:
“The hardest part of making my design was getting the movement right for all of the moving parts. The piece features 22 moving parts, with 3 sets of gears all controlled by a single shaft. I spent a large amount of time sanding and filing away at the teeth of the gears, in order to get a smooth and consistent motion. Another challenge was painting. I wanted my design to be a scale model of the original, and I was able to accomplish that- my piece is exactly 1:10 scaled down from the original painting! However, this came with the challenge of some very difficult parts to paint. A lot of the parts were far too small to paint using even my smallest paintbrushes, and I ended up painting most of the piece using toothpicks! I also wanted to replicate the original as closely as possible, and I ended up using over 18 different paints, and blending them to get the right shades of blues and greens."
Congratulations Ayush from everyone in MME, you make us proud! You created a masterpiece and as Vincent Van Gogh said, “I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.”