This is the little story about how the mushroom wall shelf series came to be. In October of 2020 - over 3,5 years ago i had a small idea for a project that somehow evolved into my biggest and most successful design series. I love creating more on more of these shelfs and the design process brings me a lot of joy. Since people seem to appreciate the work - i am super grateful that this whole endeavor is not just enjoyed by me but also by a lot of other people.
With my recently purchased first 3D printer (of course it was a Ender 3) i started messing around to craft little things that i needed. After a few months i uploaded my first designs to thingiverse - the fungus shelf being amount the first 10 small projects. I wanted a tiny shelf for my best benchy prints - i really like those cute little test files. The shapes that i was messing around with kind of looked like a mushroom if you squint your eyes a little so i decided to just run with it and pretend it was on purpose. So this whole thing came to be a “happy little accident” as bob ross would call it.
People seemed to like it so i wanted to make another one - the tinderfungus. I only knew parametric design software like fusion 360 - so the shape was still kind of abstract. I also did not really check for how these look in real life - and some people still say it looks more like a coral.
In 2022 i wanted to learn blender for organic sculpting. I taught myself the basics by watching youtube videos. Since the tinderfungus was one of my “best sellers” - that means it sold more than 10 times back then - i wanted to expand the series and get a more realistic mushroom shape. At that time i was still kind of unaware that this might turn into a bigger thing. My first blender sculpt was the oyster fungus - and to be honest that went way better than expected - it got a lot of positive feedback - which made it clear for me that i need to dig a little deeper into the subject.
With increasing sculpting skills and more nature observations i created the Amanita, Ostrea and Djamor fungus. At that time i also decided to actually try to make these based on real life species and not just come up with random names. I use the Latin names since then. All four of the generation two are best sellers to this day and have been printed thousand of times. They contribute so much to my income that i can definitely be sure that i would not be where i am today without them.
In 2023 i wanted to take this to a next level of realism. I am outdoors a lot anyway and love hiking so i decided to buy a 3d scanner and go on the hunt for great specimen. I love this a lot because i can combine my passion for nature with design - so i enjoy every moment of it. When i finally had a few usable scans of a species i created the first shelf with them - the pinicola. Even if 3d scans are used it still requires careful sculpting to turn them into usable shelfs - combining several scans and slightly adapting them while maintaining there original shape is my go-to process since then. I never take home or damage the organism that i scan so i always enjoy coming back to see how they have grown since i scanned them.
I already have a few more in the pipeline - but since a lot of luck is involved in actually finding “shelfable” speciman - their releases are rare. I have just finished another one and this is why i wanted to tell you how we came here in the first place. Stay tuned and thanks for reading all of this!