Napkin sketches will never seem quite as satisfactory once the 3Doodler is in every creatives office. The 3Doodler works like a hot glue gun (which we previously saw incorporated in 3D printing artworks) except with plastic in lieu of gloopy adhesive. Hot melting plastic is rapidly cooled by the pens powerful fan. The resulting three dimensional sketches share an aesthetic with the fluid line work of light painting.

The 3Doodler has been a massive Kickstarter success, seeing  13 times its funding target met within 72 hours of going live. The funding drive is notable in the close links forged with Etsy artists Bud Bullivant, Ruth Jensen and Ele McKay. All are noted for their wireframe art and each have been gifted with the pen to create exclusively 3Doodled scultpures. This is a canny way for Wobbleworks to create a shop window for their product. The artistic appeal of the pen is undoubtedly a factor in its popularity. And we can hardly thing of a better companion for this item than the Filabot (a devise designed to melt down your “crapjects” into reusable raw materials).

About the only thing the pen has in common with 3D printing is the extrusion technology. Existing 3D printing still has a way to go in lowering the entry barrier of computer aided drawing necessary to create 'physible' objects. This barrier is done away with by 3Doodler (though at the obvious expense of structural integrity). Whats interesting about 3Doodler is that it's a new type of creativity toy (like the etch a sketch was before it). Learning to draw structures in 3D is a new sandbox to play in. Some of the work done into digitally mapping gestures by F.A.T.'s graffiti mark up language might travel down unexpected trajectories if 3Doodler ignites imaginations as much in practice as they have managed during their fundraising.