A worthy guardian

Background. Fearlessness is an excellent attribute of Kai's attitude to chemistry. He took over a project that gave quite a few synthetic headaches. We tried distorting a propeller away from symmetry by bringing each blade. The associated strain was tricky to handle as well as the often unpredictable behavior of the (concealed anti)aromatic subunits. A continuous struggle that has more than once been reflected in Kai's stay with us, from his (successful!) application when he was still in Wuhan and Covid hit to his battle with visa and work permit renewals. But Kai has managed to fight his way deeper into the dungeon over and over. He is a brilliant chemist and an even greater person and his sculpture should reflect his fluidity of thinking. Besides, when he joined us (out of the plane and right into our first-ever group retreat), we began with drinking tea, the GonFu Cha way. Tea is the great unifier, even when East meets West. Water had to be featured in some way.
Kai was the first to help out with my first steps into 3D printing and we printed quite a few things to get a feel for boundary conditions and handling. Over time, we begun printing more and more ambitious stuff and we both liked printing oriental dragons - their spatial proportions make them a formidable challenge to print. The lore of the (wingless) Eastern dragon is much different from the European one, mostly associated with wisdom and benevolence and seen as living forces of nature and protectors of the Earth's elements, especially water. I liked this conjunction of what Kai's experience on dragons must be and how it differed from mine. I thought it quite fitting to use a dragon as a guardian figure and his hoard to be one of Kai's molecules. But also to have it represent not greed and evil but the natural, fluid state of things. Chemistry is hard after all, not bad. 

Sculpt. From our early 3D printing forays we had quite a few dragons left over, and the largest of them (all 10 pieces or so), Kai always wanted to assemble and paint but never found time - which from a PI perspective is probably a good thing. That dragon (Azure Dragon, a sculpt by the fabulous team around Mini Monster Mayhem) became the centerpiece and the challenge would ultimately become to make the proportions and stand fit to the already printed dragon model. I thought a fitting setting would be a dark, wet cave somewhere deep below (Kai does like DnD). The spiked stones represent that cave and could be an island in an underground lake. On it we find the object of desire in lustrous gold (again, more on the Western side of things). I purposely chose one of Kais molecules we never actually planned to make but found anyway, an intricate set of a 7, 8 and 9 membered ring surrounding a central nitrogen atom. The dragon is quite all over the place and making the molecule fit (and support the weight) was an entire challenge on its own. To give it the appearance of a treasure long lost, I used displacer fields to chip away at the mesh (Cinema 4D's fields are extremely powerful once you understand how they work) and, as always used the volume builder to combine all units into a single, printable mesh. I built the stand model including the dragon and then reverse-engineered dimensions such that the already printed dragon eventually would fit. A particular challenge was that the dragon was big and needed a big stand, which required carefully cutting the stand into multiple pieces. That also meant to not be entirely certain if the dimensions were right until most parts were printed. Not ideal. I won't even talk about how I sat in the office late at night trying to fuse the dragon to the model... the struggle was very real.

Colors. Kai's graduation was just a few days after the beginning of the Chinese New Year - the year of the dragon. In Chinese tradition, the color red represents luck and success while here a red dragon would mostly likely be associated with fire. I liked the opportunity to explore this East meets West theme more and used red as the main theme, but not pure red as you usually would, but one oscillating between good and bad. The color scheme can, for instance with the yellow head, always be seen as an origin for destruction (fire) or illumination (light). Much the same way the central nitrogen (a likely position for an optically active radical to sit) emits light or radiation, depending. From a technical point I started with a black primer and then value sketched light sources before glazing. To give it a wet appearance I used a high gloss varnish. I still like the juxtaposition of how we, as Europeans, would never consider a dragon or its lair wet.

Molecular Models: Spartan/Pymol
Sculpts: Maxon Cinema 4D, Azure Dragomn by Mini Monster Mayhem
Slices: Lychee
Print: Phrozen Mighty 12k
Paint: Grex Tritium, Acrylics (Glazes mostly), Varnish

Need the project files? Write us!