Childhood masterpieces still lining the dusty drawers of your parents’ file cabinets are no longer in danger of yellowing and crumbling away into obsoletion. Barcelona-based designer Bernat Cuni has developed a service called CrayonCreatures that gives three-dimensional life to the colorful characters in children’s sketchbooks by transforming them into lasting sandstone sculptures.

Cuni scans the drawings and, using CAD to add volume and shape to the 2-dimensional shapes, he produces a vibrant, full-color print on a ZCorps 3-D printer. The resulting printout is then sent back to the artist for a fee that ranges from $150-$120 (plus $20 for shipping to the U.S.).

The artist uses the process for his own explorations as well. His “Jana” series similarly uses 3-D printing to appropriate existing toys by adding new patterns and textures to the objects digitally. In one instance the artist even placed a Google map of Hong Kong on a plush teddy’s bears body, creating a set of filters much like those used in popular software like Instagram to re-imagine the toy. He described his vision in a recent interview with Wired, saying, “The idea behind the Jana series is the ‘editing’ capability of the digital environment.”

“We have became very familiar [with] editing our digital things — from formatting a text in a word processing software to applying filters to our photos,” Cuni told Wired. “So, when thinking that stuff will become digital as well, I thought about how  plugins/effects/filters for the real objects might look.”

— Alanna Martinez

(Images courtesy CrayonCreatures.)

Tags: 3D Printing, Alanna Martinez, CrayonCreatures, Drawing, News