Endless PLA #24 (April 2023) - Spring is in the Design
It’s springtime and “spring” is our April theme, guiding both our filament and digital designs for this month.
Spring, that messy transition of a season that can’t decide between winter and summer. As soon as we get a taste of the warmth summer will bring, we get a surprise reminder of winter. Why can’t the weather make up its mind?
Therefore, it seemed appropriate to work with colors that can’t make up their minds either. I decided to continue working with our new transition technique, developed for February’s colors. It’s so pleasing to see a range of colors in one filament!
For a spring feeling, I kept the base white to create a pastel palette with the same style as February’s Scarlet Symphony, but replaced red with blue, green, and yellow for April’s trio. Just like February’s colors, the base is opaque and the transition repeats about every 50g.
The red, being a very concentrated pigment, required only one dose for a transition with about equal dark and light portions. For blue, green, and yellow, we needed more pigment to balance light and dark proportions. Our founder, Dustin, was able to adapt his new Duet-driven mechanisms to dose more than one time in a 50g section. The extra doses and time to dose gave us the needed adjustment to extend the dark portion of the transition.
With colors and technique defined, we needed names. February’s colors were given musical names with help from AI and several Protopasta team members like Hudson from production who you’ll find hanging out virtually on the Protoplebs discord and IRL at the Rocky Mountain RepRap Festival (RMRRF) later this month.
For April, co-founder and all around punny guy, Aaron, looked to the outdoors for inspiration and saw the varying blue and yellow filaments as Partly Cloudy and Partly Sunny, respectively.
But what to call the green? It’s not grass green. All I could see was mint, but then a conversation with my wife, Keri, took us to tropical waters (it was spring break last week and we love to play in the surf with our kiddos). It’s totally a Seafoam Green, don’t you agree? And so it stands…
Introducing Partly Cloudy Blue (PCB), Seafoam Green (SFG), and Partly Sunny Yellow (PSY).
None of these filaments would exist without Trish and Melvin (not yet been mentioned). To prepare your subscription filaments, Trish painstakingly packages each coil, assembles spools, and compounds materials. Melvin is our mix-master and like Trish and Hudson, helps keep the filament extrusion lines running and material in spec. You might not meet or speak with Trish and Melvin, but their contribution is a part of every filament.
Keeping with the spring theme, Heidi, who wears many hats at Protoplant and you may have chatted with in support or met at a live event, prepared some beautiful stickers embracing the latest six colors all made with our new transition technique. We hope you enjoy them!
Last, but not least, Corey of CM Designs was right at home designing a gnome given the spring theme! The result is a multi-part assembly where beard, body, hat, and nose print separately. There is even a hairified with Blender version of his beard for some extra fun!
Yes, we have a history with gnomes. Protognome spent many years on our cardboard spool sides in 2D, pouring pellets into our extruder. Community member Barry Masterson designed a 3D gnome for us in 2016 with the original Protoplant company logo gear. With the rebranding, we swapped the gear for our hex P for a 2021 remix.
Gnome matter which gnome you prefer, download Protopasta designs like these for free on your favorite model platform by clicking an icon below.
Click an icon below to find Protopasta on your favorite social media platform. Feel free to share your makes and tag us if you like!
All our best,
Alex and the Protopasta Team
