The second I saw it I thought to myself, "I could totally 3D print that thing." It was something I had in the back of mind, but Jess's style moves in and out of '3D-print-able' quite a bit with it's complexity, and I didn't want to bug her with any kind of unnecessary guidelines to work around since I wasn't even sure I was going to try it. But alas, this was totally printable, and I began figuring out how I was going to make this work.
PLANNING STAGE
The most obvious hurdle in this project is the size. I wanted the width of the piece to match the width of the changing table it was going above. When I scaled it up the dimensions it came out to 18? H x 40? W. The bed of my 3D printer is only 6? x 9? So some planning was needed.
The basic workflow would be to import all splines to 3DS Max directly from Jess's Illustrator file and extrude. In theory, if I could keep all the editing/creation to the Illustrator file, I would never run into mismatching files. This idea (originally thought of for organization) ended up being the saving grace of the project when it came to getting the piece on the wall (more on that later).
PRODUCTION STAGE
I started with the white lines behind the letters. There are 26 white lines(depending how you count them). Some were broken up into 2 parts, some into 3. I think all in all there were 34 pieces. In the AI file, I added in circle-splines small enough to house a 18-gauge brad nail. I then boolean'd out two such holes into each printed piece. Then I glued in the brad nails into the holes and sanded everything for paint. (White semigloss).