Yusi Gao | Karen Blumberg

I’m currently working with Yue Tang and Yusi Gao, Class VIII Mandarin teachers at The Brearley School, on a Xingming Yin (personal name seals) project. Historically and currently, a yin is a seal or stamp used to “prove identity on documents, contracts, art, or similar items where authorship is considered important.” After learning about Ian Klapper’s medieval seals and “moveable type” projects at Construct3D conference, I was inspired to suggest this to the Mandarin teachers.

Yue and Yusi allotted three class periods for students to design a seal in Tinkercad, print their stamp on our Makerbot printers, and try using the finished product. The steps involved are:

Create a hand-drawn design
Use Photoshop to isolate the ink
Flip the image horizontally
Export as JPG
Convert JPG to SVG (with online converter)
Import SVG to Tinkercad
Place SVG onto a box
3D print

Here are the slides I shared with the Brearley girls to help them navigate the Photoshop and Tinkercad steps at their own pace:

Today, I’m going to run to a stationery store to purchase sealing wax (which melts via an embedded wick like a candle) and wax glue sticks that can be heating through a glue gun. With better planning, I would have ordered these three items below via Amazon: