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You can help make a 3D print of Edgar Allan Poe’s head

Baltimore making maven Todd Blatt is assembling a crowdsourced sculpture.

A rendering of the Edgar Allan Poe bust designed by Ryan Kittleson. (Courtesy image)

Assembling a giant 3D-printed bust requires a lot of printers. (The makers of this illicit Edward Snowden statue might be able to relate.) So, to pull off building a giant bust of Baltimore’s own Edgar Allan Poe, Todd Blatt is turning to the crowd.
Through a project called We The Builders, Blatt is making 250 separate pieces of Poe available to print. He’s looking for folks with 3D printers to take a piece, print it and mail it to an address provided by the organizers. Contributions are due by June 4.
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We The Builders already has busts of Ben Franklin and George Washington to its name — but Poe represents a distinctly Baltimore direction. The previous two pieces were scans of existing sculptures. Poe is an original work by Ryan Kittleson, designed in ZBrush.
Fittingly, it’s also a little more colorful.
“The neat thing we’re doing this time is guiding the final sculptures colors slightly, by asking people to print with darker colors for the hair and shirt, and lighter colors for the face and scarf,” Blatt writes. (We recently profiled his life-size replica of Han Solo trapped in carbonite.)
Blatt cut up pieces of the design below, to give us a sense of the finished product:

courtesy Todd Blatt

(Rendering courtesy of Todd Blatt)

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