Welcome to my new tutorial!

If you are an art and organization lover, you will love this project as it will not only keep your sticky notes close at hand with a place for a pencil, but it will also add a vibrant and colorful touch to your work or study space.

I will guide you step by step through the process of creating it.

We'll use 3d printed pieces in rainbow colors to create a unique piece of art.

Make sure you have the necessary materials on hand and, most importantly, have fun while creating your own work and if you are even braver customize it to your liking!

let's get started!

Step 1: See the Trailer

We invite you to enjoy a trailer of less than 30 seconds full of action and emotion. Turn up the volume :)

Thank you for your visit and don't forget to share it with your friends!

Step 2: Supplies

Materials:

1.75 mm PLA filaments (white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, fuchsia)
Post-it 1.5”x2” (38 mm x 50 mm). https://amz.run/6vRV
Wooden pencil.
Epoxy glue (or any other glue for 3d plastic parts).
Small MDF rectangles 3 mm / 6 mm / 10mm (*)

(*) These pieces of wood can be replaced by anything else, they are used to level the plastic pieces when gluing them (see step 5).

Tools:

3D printer (or access to one of them).
3D Printer Cutting Pliers.
Table saw or manual saw.
Toothpicks (to apply epoxy cement)

Step 3: Design

I was inspired by a work of art made with large stacked corporeal letters, which was part of the exhibition "Bizi Poza""Joy to live" in Basque, which was the title of the exhibition in 2012 by the Spanish artist Javier Mariscal.

As I was looking for a fun design, it occurred to me to play with the individual letters of the word RAINBOW, assigning to each one the colors that make it up: (R) red, (A) orange, (I) yellow, (N) green, (B) blue, (O) violet. For the letter W, I added the fuchsia color that matches the previous ones.

Looking at the letters I thought they must be plastic, like stackable pieces from a child's game, or the game "Jenga" where it is about stacking pieces of wood that keep them in balance. I chose the look of the letters as if they were cut out of paper, with a similar height and width, but with random depth to give it a lot of informality.

Using the Lost Marble Moho software, I vectorially drew the silhouette in 2d each of the letters and exported them in SVG format. I then used Autodesk Fusion 360 software for the complete design of this project. I imported the SVG file containing the vector drawing of the letters.

Using the extrude command, I gave the depth to each letter and stacked them into a set of 2 letters for the monosyllables: RA, IN, and BO. The letter W was left below supporting the others. When I stacked the letters I did so irregularly as if a child were balancing them to form a tower.

The base where the letters rest is a 50 mm x 50 mm white cube, which serves as a place to place post-it notes and a pencil.

Later in step 7 you will see that you can customize with other attractive ideas.

In the link below, you can see the project in Autodesk Fusion 360: https://a360.co/3Qr7CfE

Step 4: Print 3D

The print was made with PLA filament on a 3d printer.

We are going to print 8 pieces, 7 letters and 1 cube-shaped support.

Red piece (“R” letter) quantity = 1
Orange piece (“A” letter) quantity = 1
Yellow piece (“I” letter) quantity= 1
Green piece (“N” letter) quantity =1
Blue piece (“B” letter) quantity= 1
Purple piece (“O” letter) quantity=1
Fuchsia piece (“W” letter) quantity=1
White piece (holder) quantity=1

To generate the GCODE file I arranged the pieces in CURA so that the back of the letters is located on the printer bed, and the front of the letter faces up. To get a good quality and finish to that front layer, be sure to use the “Enable ironing” option.

With the attached STL files you can export to the program you use to define the printing parameters (CURA, etc.) and export to GCODE:

The main parameters that I used were:
Layer Height = 0.16mm.
Fill = 20%
Enable ironing=yes
Bed temperature = 60 degrees.
Nozzle temperature = 200 degrees.
Printing speed = 50 mm / min.
Generate support = no

Once the parts are printed, use fine sandpaper or tweezers to remove any damage or printing failure on the plastic parts.

Step 5: Assembly

Once the pieces are printed, arrange them on the work table in a horizontal position, locating the monosyllables "RA", "IN", "BO", and the letter "W". Make sure that the faces of the letters are absolutely free of dust or printing defects.

Since the pieces are glued together at different heights from the horizontal level of the work table, I used small rectangular pieces of MDF wood as seen in the photos. These pieces of wood can be replaced by anything else (metal, cardboard, etc.)

I used clear epoxy glue (drying time 10 min), which usually comes with two knobs that need to be mixed together to form the final glue.

With a small toothpick starting from the lower letter W, apply a small amount of glue only in the parts where the letters come into contact with each other (See figure), both on the upper and lower part and on the sides.

Apply light pressure to join the pieces and repeat the above procedure until all the letters are complete.

Before you start gluing, as epoxy glue has a very short time to apply and also hardens quickly, plan the gluing sequence perfectly to avoid mistakes when gluing.

Remove any eventual excess glue on the surfaces with a cutter.

Finally, apply glue to the letter W and fix the whole assembly to the white support cube as seen in the figure.

Once the assembly is perfectly glued, rotate the assembly 90 degrees to place it in its final vertical position.

The work is almost ready.

Step 6: Ending

To finish, I cut with a hand or bench saw, a pencil with an approximate length of 100 mm and sharpen it.

The pencil rests horizontally in the circular housing of the cube and the 1.5”x2” (38mm x 50mm) post-its in the rectangular housing.

You can see your finished work. It is time to find a place in the house, the study room, the library and even the kitchen to use it and enjoy its colors.

Step 7: Brainstorming & Customize

If you wanted the work to be just a small art object, you could use a white cube without the post-it and pencil holders (stl file attached here).

Also in my brainstorm I made two models to add more post-its that can also be useful: a model with 4 spaces to house post-its on one side and another model with three spaces to house on different sides See the renderings.

You could choose a different word and/or other colors according to your taste. It may be a good idea to choose a somebody's name for a gift, etc. You just have to model the letters in Fusion 360 or your favorite 3d program to do it.

You could also change the font. There are hundreds of letter letter alternatives commonly used for woodcutting.