So far on my quest to create a dragon coin as author merch I have been working on the obverse (front) side, but now it’s time to think about what to put on the dragon coin’s reverse side.
As I mentioned for the front/obverse of the coin, this is for a fictional fantasy book (i.e. the book doesn’t exist yet), where dragons rule the world, and humans are very much their underlings. In this world, the dragons always want to remind the humans that the dragons have their eye on them. Literally, in this case, because the coins of this realm have a big ol’ dragon eye on the back of their coins.
…but in the meantime I had a brilliant serendipitous experience, thanks to AI sometimes being a bit rubbish.
Serendipity
I gave my dragon coin 2D image to meshy.ai to render into a 3D-printable design. And meshy.ai completely misinterpreted my image of a coin, and turned it into an oval shape:
But actually, that turned out to be the absolute best thing that it could have done, because what the AI didn’t know was that for the reverse of the coin my intention was to have the dragon’s eye on it. So suddenly I thought, “Duh! why have I stuck to the normal round design for a coin? Why don’t I make it eye-shaped?”
I explained that to Google Gemini, and it came up with what I think is a great coin. However, this particular object is a bit ambitious for my current production abilities, because not only is it made of metal (which my laser can’t etch to any depth), but there is also a coloured glass dragon eye in the middle of it:
That’s what I would love to aim toward, eventually, but in the meantime I just want to concentrate on creating a metal coin.
So here is a slightly less ambitious version of a dragon coin:
(I won’t go into all the long boring detail of how AI refused to put the lettering around it that I wanted (which means I’ll need to ‘manually’ add the text later), but for now I’m pretty happy with the all-metal version of this coin.)
3D-Printed Moulds
Although I don’t currently have any equipment that can etch/stamp/cast metal, I do have access to a local MakerLab where I can use a 3D printer. Here are the first experiments that I tried for the front/obverse of the coin (which I also changed to an eye-shape once AI had accidentally given me that brilliant idea). There are three moulds of various sizes, plus a plastic version of the coin itself:
So now I need something to put into the moulds, to actually make the coins. But I do have some plans for that stage…
Have you tried to make coin moulds using a 3D printer? What did you use for casting? How did it go? Let me know in the comments below!