The Olympic Games landed in Rio de Janeiro, turning Brazil into the first South American country to host the oldest sports event of all time. While welcoming many different athletes from all over the world to compete in a wide range of different sports, the Archery competition is where our gaze is specifically aiming on.
Since 1998, the World Archery is making limited edition pens out of broken arrows to give away to the VIP attendants of their competitions (learn how to make your own arrow pen here). But we can definitely agree that a special pen can’t just fly around on your desk – it has to be stored in a memorable way too.
During the 2012 Games in London, the World Archery used Cricket Balls to store the arrow-shaped pen in. While that was awesome, cricket balls have no symbolic meaning in Rio de Janeiro. This years’ Archery Olympics competition took place at the impressive Sambódromo, which you might recognize as the ending point of the yearly Rio Carnival, and definitely is one of the first places that comes to mind when thinking about Rio de Janeiro.
The Arrow Pen would not be complete without a symbol to remind the games in Rio, and what other material than our 3D printed Porcelain could represent the concrete arch better? The result is stunning, yet elegant.
The Sambódromo is a huge purpose-built area for the yearly Rio Carnival, but used for the Archery and Athletics Marathon events for the 2016 Olympics and for Archery event in the 2016 Paralympics. Photo is courtesy of World Archery. Please note the Sambódromo Pen Holder is a gift from World Archery to a selected group of attendees and not part of Rio 2016.
By collaborating intensively with the World Archery and their 3D designer, we went through a few iterations to get a printable design and archieve the best details possible. Since we knew we had a very short time to print all the penholder statues, we worked intensively in speeding up our Porcelain printing process. This resulted in a lead time reduction of 50%! Read more about that and some tips for designing 3D Printed Porcelain in our previous blog.