Ceci n’est pas un robot (the making of a hero image)
When I started preparing for Maker Faire Providence 2025, I decided it was time for some fresh design work. In years past, I’d usually pick a photo from a prior year for the hero image. This time, I decided to put a little more design effort into our hero image. My parents had a book of René Magritte’s work that I always enjoyed flipping through as a child, so I thought I’d attempt a tribute to one of Magritte’s paintings. I wanted to incorporate something suggestive of Providence, and I also wanted to include the Maker Faire Robot, Makey.
Choosing the Design Elements
I have a photo of the Providence skyline as viewed from the Maker Faire Providence location (195 District Park), and was drawn to Magritte’s Golconda painting: against a background of buildings, dozens of men are depicted falling from (or perhaps rising into) the sky. They are not all identical, but similar enough that I could get away with using Makey. The men all face slightly different directions, so I needed to pose Makey, and decided I’d use three poses (facing front, and turned slightly left and right).
Rendering an STL
I thought about using a CAD tool to pose Makey and rendering to a PNG, but I wanted to do it in code. It looked like I could use Mayavi with Python to load the STL and render it. I’d been fiddling around with GitHub CoPilot, and decided to use it for this project; I tried crude prompts like “mayavi render stl” and “render stl in python”, which got me to a decent starting point. It helped me figure out how to apply the official Maker Faire red color to the STL, and export it to an image.
CoPilot’s suggestion for removing the background wasn’t great; it suggested I use Pillow to open the image, convert it to RGBA, examine all its pixels, and set anything close to white to white (#FFFFFF). Although I used a different approach in the end, CoPilot was still helpful when I needed to figure out how to set the camera position.
You can find my code on GitHub. I had difficulties installing the Mayavi dependency with pip under my environment (Ubuntu under WSL on Windows ARM), so I installed it with sudo apt-get install mayavi2 and when I created a virtual environment, I added the --system-site-packages argument to mkvirtualenv.
To run this program, you’ll need to tell it which STL to render and what color to use. I downloaded the Maker Faire Robot STL, and ran my script, which gave me the three images I needed:
./render_stl.py --stl MAKE_Robot_V6.stl --color 237 28 36
The Final Artwork
With that done, I loaded my background image into Affinity Photo, placed my Makey images where I needed them, creating three layers of falling (or rising) robots. I added a few minor touches: copying tree branches into the foreground so the Makeys were behind it, and adding some Makey shadows on one of the buildings. Next year, I’ll have to challenge myself to create a design based on a different painting!
I hope you can join us at the Faire on September 6. Check out our list of makers here, and learn more about attending here.
