Light up a silhouette or outline of your favorite animal or shape. Unicorns, cats, rockets, fish...

Probably inspired from paper lanterns, neopixel LEDs light up and animate a shape formed on the lamp.

Supplies

paper or fabric to cover the lamp

cardboard

microcontroller and addressable LEDs, you can create animated lights with these or just use a string of fairy lights

fiberfill for diffusing the LEDs

Step 1: Fish Wrapper

On a large piece of paper draw or print out the outline of the object you want to be lit up.

You can even use a computer image printed out poster size and pieced together to form one large sheet.

I found an outline of a goldfish I liked and ran it through the web online rasterbator.net to convert it to a printable poster size image. Scale and print out in the size you want your lamp to be.

Cut strips of cardboard to form the walls of the lamp. Slice strips with the cardboard's corrugations running up and down the short width of the strip. This makes it easier to bend the cardboard to follow the curves of your shape.

You can glue or tape the cardboard strips to follow the outline of your printed shape. Piece and glue together cardboard strips to form a continuous rim or frame of your shape. Add a second or third layer to stiffen up the frame.

If I had a large sheet of paper in the beginning, I would have glued the cardboard strips directly to the printed outline but the intention was to create a frame to be covered with fabric later. Instead of cardboard to form the frame, there are other materials you could use like bended wood for a more permanent installation.

Further subdivide your shape to make a stained-glass like effect.

Use folded origami techniques to texture your covering paper. I tried to just crumple up paper to attach instead of fabric.

Step 2: It's Lit

I had the electronics left over from another lamp project.

Be like Bach and do variations or improvisations on a theme...

It is a microcontroller board with a couple of neopixel strips and a small neopixel ring attached. I lit up the ring to be the eye of the fish and ran fire light animations on the strips in different colors to give me a rainbow fish. It is coded in Circuitpython so it was easy to adjust the colors and lights to something aesthetically pleasing.

Place the electronics in the lamp and fill with fiberfill for additional diffusion of the LEDs.

Cut away the excess paper or leave as is for fish in a wrapper or frame everything for a wall hanging.

Make your own and experiment.

Enjoy!