Stephen Colbert Portrait / Bust

Summer before last, Bre Pettis, founder of Makerbot was on the Colbert Report. Part of the segment revolved around scanning Stephens head in order to print a copy of it in the Makerbot. It was all pretty hilarious, as is usually the case with the Report. For that show, the sign off was done with a printed puppet head(a la ventriloquist dummy). Makerbot made the mesh of Steven's head available through Thingaverse, encouraging 3d folks to play with it or, mash it into variants. It was a big wow moment for me. I was just beginning to learn Zbrush at the time, expressly for the purposes of 3d printing and prototyping. I figured that having access to Stephen's gross geometry would make the portrait a piece of cake...so not so. The scan of Stephen's head is a frighteningly lumpy, bumpy, blob of a thing but, I was commited to the notion and charged into it's basic masses.

I set out to create a presidential style bust but, a little sillier. It was actually quite a bit of work and in the end, probably took as long as if I'd done it in clay. The big difference of course is that this can be printed or carved directly from the file. It's a suddenly strange and wonderful thing to be in possession of Stephen Colbert's head. He's mine to play with now...mwa ha ha ha!!!!