Karin Sander Karin Sander 1:5, 2015

Karin Sander is one of the first artists to apply 3D scanning and printing technology to figurative sculpture making, which she began experimenting with in the early 2000s.

Body Scans, Sander’s well-known series of miniature (usually 4-inch) figure portraits, are created by scanning a person (herself, notable public figures, athletes, art world colleagues, friends, and strangers) with a 3D Whitelight Scanner, which employs a 3D photographic process originally developed for the fashion industry. The body scanner reads the entire surface of a person’s body, and sends the resulting data to a printer that builds a three-dimensional replica of the person in thinly layered cross-sections of ABS plastic, a process known as fused-deposition modeling. Airbrushed colour is subsequently applied.