Most people meet the idea the same way: a photograph of something that looks like an oil painting, with a caption saying it came off a 3D printer. The first reaction is that it must be printed on paper and glued to a plastic board. It isn't. There is no ink anywhere in the process.
Where the colour comes from
Filament is not fully opaque. Light goes a little way into it, bounces, and comes back out. How far it gets before it hits the layer underneath is what your eye reads as colour.
So the whole trick is thickness. Lay one thin layer of yellow over black and you get a muddy olive. Lay six layers of the same yellow over the same black and you get a clean gold. Same two filaments, two completely different colours, and the only thing that changed is how much plastic the light had to travel through. A picture built this way can hold dozens of shades while the printer only ever loads four or five actual spools.
This is also why the piece has to be lit from the front, like a real painting. It is not a lithophane — a lithophane is thin, translucent and needs a lamp behind it. A filament painting is opaque, sits on a shelf or hangs on a wall, and comes alive under a lamp above it or a window beside it.
How the piece is actually built
- The image is chosen and simplified. Not every photograph survives the translation — more on that below.
- The palette is picked from the filaments in the studio. Four or five colours, in a deliberate order, darkest usually first. This is the part that decides whether the piece sings or goes grey, and it is judgement, not a button.
- The software works out the height of every point. Each pixel gets a thickness that will produce the shade wanted at that spot, and the result is a relief — a real surface with hills and valleys, typically one and a half to two millimetres deep in total.
- The printer swaps filament at set layers. It prints all of the first colour, changes, prints all of the second, and so on, straight up.
- It comes off the plate finished. No painting, no varnish, no post-processing beyond trimming the edge.
Watch it happen
A still photograph cannot show the part that makes sense of all this — the moment a flat grey slab suddenly becomes a face because the fourth colour went down. This timelapse does.
Timelapse from the Jeremy Makes channel, shown here so you can see the technique.
Anything can go in the frame
The three pieces at the top of this page came off our own plate: a Van Gogh, a tiger, a comic character. Nothing about the method is tied to famous paintings — whatever you can hand us as an image, we can build as a relief.
- A portrait from your photograph — you, your partner, your parents, a wedding shot, a graduation
- Your pet — the single most requested subject, and one that works beautifully because animal fur is all texture
- A logo, an emblem, a sticker — a company mark for the office wall, a team badge, a band logo
- Game and film art — posters, characters, cover art
Send the image on WhatsApp and we will tell you within the day whether it carries, and what the palette would be.
What prints beautifully
Flat areas of colour with a hard edge. That is why Japanese woodblock prints, Art Nouveau posters, silhouettes against a sky, logos and high-contrast portraits all work so well: they were already built out of shapes rather than out of gradients.
- Sunsets and skylines — broad bands of colour, exactly what the layers want to be
- A face lit hard from one side, where the shadow is a shape and not a fade
- Anything graphic: posters, album art, emblems, lettering
What is harder, and what we will tell you before you order
Soft gradients are the enemy. A portrait with even studio lighting and gentle skin tones has to be squeezed into four or five filaments, and the transitions can band. It is still often worth doing — but we will say so first rather than take the order and hope.
The same goes for busy backgrounds, small faces in a crowd, and anything where the whole point of the picture lives in detail smaller than a millimetre. Send the photograph before you commit and we will tell you honestly whether it will carry.
Whose picture it is
If you arrive with a ready-made file you bought or downloaded, bring the licence with it and we will read it before we print — a lot of what circulates for free is licensed for personal printing only. Working from your own photograph, or from a work in the public domain, avoids the question entirely. The classics we keep ready — Hokusai, Hiroshige, Van Gogh, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Toulouse-Lautrec — come from the Metropolitan Museum's open access collection under Creative Commons Zero.
Getting one made
Send a photograph, a logo or the name of a classic, and we come back with the palette we would use, the size that suits the image, and an honest word about anything in it that will be difficult. Everything is printed and finished in our studio in Netanya.