I began this week's assignment with a plan to create a mold of the Statue of Liberty, but reinterpreting it through the old Delacroix painting "Liberty Leading the People." (Liberty here in 1830 is the same allegorical figure that Bartholdi and Eiffel would use as their statue some 50 years later.)

So I took this painting and made a PhotoShop collage of my intended finished work:

I then found a 3D model of the original Statue on Thingiverse as a starting point to work from:

My intention was to print this and a 3D scan of a live model in the pose above , and then physically merge the two by subtractive carving and additive clay, but after trying to convert initial STL files to PNG depth images for the Modela, it seemed as though the conversion would take forever:

iwoj:Desktop ian$ python stl2png.py ~/Downloads/liberty2.stl liberty.png 72 -y
read 17060 facets
adding facet: 1902/17060

So I abandoned this project and decided to go for something simpler in the meantime. I took a section of the well-known Earth at Night image to mill out a textures density map of the population of the US.

I set cad.py's nz value to 8 and calculated the 3D toolpaths:

Once the paths were calculated, I started milling a block of high-temperature wax (available at McMaster-Carr's as 9389K61/Nonabrasive Machinable Wax Hard Purple Bar, 1-1/4" Thick X 3-1/2" W X 12" L/$23.64 Each).

Six hours later...

Now I'm ready for molding!

In the meantime, my earlier stl2png.py processes completed: