Shadow Screen Basic How-To Tips

Dare I reveal the secret of shadow casting? People really liked the shadow casting screen I posted about last week. But it's incredibly difficult to do and requires super sophisticated yet extremely arcane knowledge of the underlying forces of the universe.

LOL, not really!!! Actually it's very simple and would make a great project for any designer wanting to experiment with basic 3d printing.

And as an added benefit, the screen not only casts very cool shadows, it also changes its appearance as you move around it. I've only scratched the surface of this technique, but I'm having a blast experimenting.

Sections of the screen darken and lighten at different times as the viewer moves around the screen. You can control when each section darkens in several ways. These include changing the size of the open slots as well as the depth of that section of the screen itself.

If you have ever twisted a venetian blind to control the amount of sunlight, then you understand all you need to know to create one these shadow screens. It's just that the scale and repetition of the elements made the project look complicated.

The same techniques also cast interesting shadows that change as the sun moves.

Basically, you create a grid of very thin walls. You control how quickly any one section darkens by varying the width of the slots and the height of the walls. There are other things you can do, but these two variables in combination give you all kinds of interesting effects, certainly enough to entertain you for a week or so and a spool of filament.

I have tried to explain the technique, but either the misleading appearance of sophisticated visual magic confuses people or I'm not very good at explaining things. So I decided to draw some diagrams to better explain it. These might help, or they might just confuse people even more.

Either way, they were a good exercise for me. I got to play with a vector illustration program again, and it forced me to think about how I was explaining the technique. I occasionally write a tutorial on the Instructables site, and I really enjoy that process and sharing with other makers. But if I don't practice writing and illustrating enough, I find that the process becomes painful instead of fun.  If I can figure out what I want to say and how to explain and illustrate it, I might even write a full tutorial on this technique.

So let me know if this blog post helps you understand how these screens are made. Am I on the right track or just confusing things even more?

I'll post a link to any tutorials I write, so stay tuned and keep making.

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