3D printers have taken the art world by storm, providing artist's with a brand new medium.
3D printing has become a new tool for artists around the world. Ioan Florea has been using his device to create giant, textured pictures, LiveScience reported.
"My paintings address both the visual perception and the tactile," Florea said. He added that people often walk up to his artwork and touch it.
Florea used the printing technology to build up the largest shapes in his paintings. He cured the resin using heat, instead of ultraviolet light, which is the norm. He embeds shapes in the pigment and uses a transfer technique to attach them to a canvas.
He uses lightweight materials to keep his giant paintings from getting too heavy. "With regular materials, one of my paintings would be 600 pounds, but I try to keep them to 100 pounds," he told LivesScience.
Florea's fascination with 3D artwork began when he was a child growing up in Transylvania. He would often collect sticks and animal bones and draw them. Later, he arranged animal vertebrate to form the letters of the alphabet. He tried making them with paint as well but the invention of the printer was what he had been waiting for all along.
"Today there are thousands of pigments and materials," Florea said, adding that he thinks everything can be used in art. "In that way, art truly does reflect society," he said.
The artist has also developed a quick-dry oil paint which he claims is one of the best in the world. According to Florea artist's used to develop their own paints during the Renaissance, but during the industrial revolution the focus turned to paint for machinery such as cars.
"In my paintings I integrate and explore different new pigments and lightweight materials and I get inspired from the world of nanotechnology. I developed my own custom 3D image fused resin and pigment transfer of my shapes on canvas and I also use liquid metal paint that I formulate. My paintings have double function addressing both the visual and tactile senses," Florea said in his artist's statement.
Florea's artwork is currently on display at South Bend Museum of Art in Indiana, and will remain there until 2015.
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