The Great Wave off Kanagawa - Filament Painting

The Great Wave

I adapted Hokusai's Great Wave into a 200 x 200 mm filament painting. Thin layers of Translucent Blue over white give the pale foam, over charcoal the deep navy, and over orange the dusky sky. What you need

This is not a layer-swap print. Every colour layer has several filaments in different spots. The printer must change filament automatically within each layer. No pause or manual spool swap is needed for this design.

I tested it on a Bambu Lab X1 Carbon with an AMS.

Other Bambu printers with AMS or AMS lite, Prusa MMU3, Prusa XL tool changer, Prusa CORE One with INDX, Creality CFS, Anycubic ACE Pro and similar automatic systems should work, not tested by me. The printer needs room for the 200 x 200 mm plate. Filaments and slots

I used these Bambu Lab PLA filaments in this slot order: - Slot 1: Matte Charcoal (11101), used for the base too. - Slot 2: Basic Jade White (10100). - Slot 3: Matte Mandarin Orange (11300). - Slot 4: Translucent Blue (13611).

Keep the slot assignments as supplied. A substitute changes the colour and how much light passes through the layers, so the finished picture will differ. The Translucent Blue has a large effect on the result. Files and slicing

Use great-wave-bambu.3mf in Bambu Studio for my saved project. The slots and layer heights are already set. It also opens in OrcaSlicer, which should work, not tested by me.

Use great-wave-generic.3mf for any other slicer. It has one part per filament. Preserve their shared alignment and assign each part to its matching filament. This workflow should work, not tested by me.

The first 0.56 mm is a base of Matte Charcoal. The Bambu project prints it as two 0.28 mm layers, then uses 0.08 mm colour layers.

In another slicer, use a first layer that is a multiple of 0.08 mm, such as 0.16 mm, followed by 0.08 mm layers. Make sure a layer boundary lands exactly at 0.56 mm, where the colour layers begin. - Print flat with a 0.4 mm nozzle. - Use 100% infill, 2 walls and no supports. - I recommend textured PEI. - Do not scale, rotate or re-level the plate. The stepped surface is the picture. - Dry the filament first. Damp filament shows as fuzz.

My print took about 7 h. The slicer estimate was 5.3 h and 58 g. I like it behind glass, or left bare so the surface texture shows. Credits

Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, about 1831. Public domain. Based on a colour-restored version.

Made with Polychrome (https://polychrome3d.com), the desktop app I build to turn pictures into multi-colour plates. You don't need Polychrome to print these files. Licence

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC). Print it for yourself or as a gift and share it with credit. Please do not sell the files or prints.