Snake Skeleton - 3d Printing Pen

Snakes haunt my nightmares. They are terrifying, slippery animals, perfectly designed to hide, attack by surprise and kill their victims with venom or by stragilation. Even thinking about the makes me shiver.

But when you face your fears and take a closer look, they can also be quite beautiful. They have a unique skeleton that allows them to move in a remarkable way. And what better way to overcome a fear of snakes than by proudly displaying a snake skeleton as art in your livingroom?

Do not worry, no animals were harmed in the making of this tutorial. This skeleton is made 100% out of PLA plastic.

In this tutorial I will show you how you can use clay and aluminium wire to help you design 3d objects, which you can then use as a basis for drawing with your 3d printing pen.

Sculpture:

1. 3D printing pen (I used the Mynt3d)
2. Plenty of filament (I used PLA Polaroid Root Play 3D filament, which uses wood fibers to add more texture to the filament)
3. 3D print finishing tool (I used the modifi3d with a knife tip)
4. Wire cutter
5. Flexible clay that does not dry out (I used a cheap alternative for play-doh clay)
6. Clay sculpt tool (to remove the clay)
7. Aluminium wire (iron wire may also work, make sure it is strong and flexible)

Paint:

1. Spray-paint (grey & light beige)
2. Acrylic paint (dark brown)
3. Soft paintbrush
4. Spray bottle with water
5. A lot of paper towel

Optional:

1. Glass dome with wooden base

Perhaps this is the step that felt most scary to me: taking a deep dive into the anatomy of snakes. I googled pictures of several snake skeletons as inspiration, also focussing on snake skulls. Looking at the immages gives you an idea of how you want your sculpture to look.

Pictures via Wikimedia:

1. A snake skeleton in National Museum of Natural Sciences of Spain by Tiia Monto
2. Snake Skeleton by R. A. Lydekker/ The Royal Natural History
3. Maxillary bones in red. At the American Museum of Natural History by Bloopityboop

At the Dutch Dollar Store (Action) I bought some off brand play-doh clay, made for children. To me this was the best clay to use since it does not dry out too quicky, so it is easy to remove in step 4. I picked blue a a color since it had the most contrast to my PLA filament.

Starting with the body I made a snake by rolling out the clay into a long cilinder, with a heart of aluminium wire in the middle. The wire is crucial, it will make your design not only stronger but also flexible and easy to bend while drawing on it with your 3D printing pen later.

I designed my snake to fit into the dome that I already bought, but you can make it any shape you like. Make sure the tail end looks thinner than the rest.

If you, like me, want to put the skeleton in a dome by the end, make sure your sculpture fits under the dome and keep checking this at every step.

Once you have sculpted your snake's body out of clay, you can use it to (carefully) draw on with your 3D pen. This may take some practice, so take your time. If you don't like the results, don't be affraid cut off the bad spots with a wire cutter and draw them again. I had to re-draw several parts myself.

I started by drawing the spine. Then I drew countless ribs to the side. Make sure every rib is securely connected to your spine, otherwise your sculpture will break easily. After drawing the ribs go back and reinforce the spine with a few extra layers of filament.

Since I chose a spiral shape to fit inside my glass dome, I first drew all the 'outside' ribs. This was the easy part. Getting into the right spots to draw the 'inside' ribs requires you to move your sculpture to create space for your pen. Because of the aluminium wire this is relatively easy to do, and you can bend your snake back into shape after the ribs are drawn.

Because of the spiral shape I also had to work in sections, drawing the spine one piece at a time before bending it back to shape again. If your sculpture breaks during this movement, simply use your 3d printing pen to fix it again. Choosing a different composition for your snake (i.e. 'crawling' flat on the ground) will probably be a lot easier.

Unless you are a professional, the lines you draw will not be perfect. They migt be a bit squigily, and not perfectly straight. But since this is meant to be looking like bones, it's okay to embrace these imperfections, since they can have a 'rugged' look by nature.

I was fearfull that I would ruin the snake's body when removing the clay, but luckily this was easier than expected because the clay is super flexible.

First, I removed part of the wire from the clay. Then I used a clay sculpting tool to remove a bit more clay from the middle of the clay where the wire was before. After doing this, I could easily remove the rest of the clay with my fingers.

The sculpture did break in a few places, but this was no problem since it is easy to 'weld' the pieces back together with the 3D printing pen.

After googling the shape of a snake's head in step 1, I learned that a snake's skull is made of 2 pieces: a 'head' and a 'jawbone'. I drew the outlines on a piece of paper and traced them with a few lines of 3D pen filament.

To create the 'head' part, I sculpted the clay within the drawn lines and covered the clay completely with filament, leaving open spaces for the eyes*. After that I removed the clay and altered the head using the 3d printing pen, the wire cutter and the 3D print finishing tool untill the shape was right. This sculpting prcess took a long time.

The jawbone was drawn seperately. I used the heat of the 3D print finishing tool to bend the bones to the correct angle.

To make the skeleton look more dangerous I added the fangs to both the 'head' and the 'jaw'. To get the correct shape I first drew them seperately with the 3D pen, then 'welded' the shapes to the skull on both sides. I added a few more layers of filament to the fangs to make them stronger.

After sculpting everything in the correct shape I took the knife tip of the 3D print finishing tool and used it to melt/flatten the top layer of the head and jawbone. This made the filament layers dissapear and gave them a more bone-like look

*note: the clay eyes you see in the picture turned out to be way too big, I made them smaller during the process.

As a final step I 'welded' the head and jawbone together and made the snake look scary with an open mouth. Then I welded the skull to the rest of the snake.

You could stop at this point and enjoy your skeleton snake as is. However, I decided to paint the skeleton for a more realistic look.

After spraypainting the skeleton, first with grey, and then with a light beige, I used a technique I learned from this video by Historical Recreations.

I watered down some dark brown acrylic paint with a lot of water untill it kind of looked like chocolate milk. Then, using a very soft brush, I painted it all over the skeleton, making it look very dirty. Then I took a spraybottle and sprayd the skeleton 'clean', leaving behind some brown shadows in all the creases. You may have to repeat this a couple of times.

This painting process is very messy, but gave me the results I wanted. I painted in my kitchen and used a towel and many layers of paper towel, and the paint still got through. Luckily it is easy to clean while still wet.

When the sculpture was dry it was finally time to put the skeleton inside the glass dome.

And there it is: a beautiful snake-sculpture!

Funnily enough I grew to love this project. I'm not sure it removed my fears entirely, but it definately made me look at snakes in a different way. It is a unique creature that is built in the most extrordinary way, and a fun and whimsical addition to my house.