Layer Arta Toybox tool

A picture becomes
printable colour.

Drop in a picture. It comes back as a stack of flat plates — each one printed in a single filament, stacked so the picture appears in real colour and real depth. No multi‑material printer, no supports, nothing loose.

Download for Windows  ↓ 3.7 MB · free · runs entirely on your own machine

Needs Python and Node.js — the installer checks for both and tells you where to get them.

A golden retriever illustration rendered as layered colour plates
Seven colours in, seven flat plates out — stacked, this is what you get.

How it works

You do not print colour. You print holes. The bottom plate is solid; every plate above it is solid except where a colour below needs to show through. The top plate is just the linework. Every plate is the same sheet with a solid border, so you line the edges up and the art lines itself up.

Nothing is ever looseAnything that would float gets bridged with a thin tab automatically. If it somehow cannot be, the run fails loudly instead of quietly handing you a chip to glue.
No supports, everEvery plate is a flat shape pulled straight up. It cannot overhang. That is true by construction, not by luck.
Your actual filamentTell it which spools you own. Every colour snaps to one of them, so what comes out is printable with what is on your shelf.
Checked before you sliceEvery file is verified watertight and single‑bodied. You get grams per plate measured from the real mesh.

Getting started

  1. Unzip it somewhere permanent — not your Downloads folder.
  2. Double-click START-LAYER-ART.bat. The first run installs the graphics libraries and takes a couple of minutes, and it can look like nothing is happening. It only happens once.
  3. Fill in your filament shelf first. Name and colour for each spool you own. Everything after that is built only from those colours.
  4. Drop a picture in. A verdict tells you how it will come out before anything runs.

What it can and cannot do

Best results: flat colours, bold shapes, hard edges, good contrast, and shapes that touch each other. Poster and sticker art is the sweet spot.

It cannot do: small text — anything under about 4 mm tall simply cannot exist at a 0.4 mm nozzle — smooth gradients, glows, reflections, or busy photographs. The app tells you which of these it has hit, and why, before you commit to a print.

A layered landscape piece
Three plates, three filaments. Sky, mountains, sun.