My friends mean a lot to me and I've found a lot of joy in giving thoughtful, handmade gifts to others. This video by Van Neistat provided a lot of guidance and encouraged more considerate gift giving, particularly as it relates to made objects.
We'll start from the top, for my friend Em's birthday I wanted to make her something thoughtful. I had spent a lot of time in her home over the year and she had been a very kind friend. After a lot of thinking about things to make I remembered we'd spent some lovely hours playing Fall Guys together and I thought it might be the right amount of soppy and sentimental.
I found the perfect 3D model on here of a really adorable pigeon costume. An a couple of hours printing later and I had the perfect canvas. I busted out the miniature paints and got to work. I used some reference pictures as I worked and for a couple hours work I was pretty pleased with how he turned out!
Next came Christmas and I wanted to make some thoughtful objects for my friends Matt and Kate. Lets start with Kate. Kate is a nerd, a nerd I love dearly, but a nerd nonetheless. She adores Stardew Valley and has more hours in that game than I can count. I tried fishing in subtle text messages to see if I could find a character or an item that was her favourite but she wouldn't bite. So the mascot chicken is what she gets!
Again I found the perfect file here. It is intended for multi filament printing but with the raised pixels it'll be easy to paint and will produce a really great translation of a 2D character into the 3D world.
This I filled with a lot of love and it felt really magic to give to Kate, I know where it sits on her shelf at home and that fills us both with joy.
Last but not least is Matty. This sweet boy loves his poker, he plays in tournaments regularly and currently works at the casino and has a tonne of fun. These I ended up finishing these blind and dealer buttons just before we had a poker night.
Yet again the files I found from an amazing creator can be found here. Another file designed for multi-filament printers but would be perfect for painting. As these are to be an object you touch a lot I considered mounting these to timber bases to make them both feel nicer and give them more weight, I did scrap this idea as didn't have the time nor skills to make 3 nice circles that size. I also considered embeddign wieghts in them however, this was more effort than I reasonably had time for. So to ensure they were weighty I printed them with around 50% infill and they ended up coming out a really lovely weight for handling.
These had to be completed for poker night and by Jove I did it! They were a blast to play with and genuinely made the night run a lot smoother. And most importantly Matty loved his Christmas present.
I was super proud of my restraint through these projects, to not let them take over my life for several weeks and to ensure that the scope of works was actually reasonable for me to complete.
Making these thoughtful gifts was an amazingly rewarding process and in fact for all of these projects but my favourite part was sitting down and thinking about my friends. Thinking about what they cared about, what we had shared and what I could make for them within my skillsets and time budget that could mean the most to them.
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