Contact

How about this amazing pose in another photo I found on Pinterest? 
It appears to have come from the Raw Moves collection by photographer, James Houston.

I love the point of contact of the feet, which reminds me of some of the abstract works of Henry Moore or Jean Arp.

I think it will print OK. I'm just not sure how well it would translate into a female pose. 

What do you think?

Well, I had to give it a go, didn't I! As it turned out, getting the pose right was the easy part. I increased the muscle tone a bit and shaped the breasts into a position that suggest they are hanging in the correct direction.
Finding a way to actually print the model proved much more challenging.

Here is a view of the model in MeshLab.

The biggest problem was the contact point of the two big toes - I just knew that the tiny point of contact would be incapable of supporting the weight of the top leg growing upwards above it without breaking. After experimenting with several different ideas and some abortive prints, I decided to cut the model across the middle and print it in two halves. Finding the best place to make the cut took several attempts but the final solution turned out to be the obvious one - cut exactly between the two big toes at the contact point.

Here is the model in Cura, ready for slicing. I used MeshMixer to generate the support structures because it allowed me to place them exactly where I needed them.

And here is the same view in Repetier Host, showing the Gcode file ready for printing.

OK, it's finished! I had to reprint the leg because the toes broke on the first try due to poorly positioned supports. After cleaning them up in Blender I had another go and it came out much better.
I printed in PLA and after cleaning up the support material I used superglue to join the two halves together.

Straight from the printer, supports still attached.

Front view, reproducing the original pose.

Viewed from the back.

 
There are some nasty blemishes left behind where the supports were removed and I've also noticed that I'm getting more Z-banding on the models than I used to see. Maybe time to think about tuning up the printer again.

Best supporting act

Now that I have a delta printer that can make taller prints, I decided to go back and revisit one of my earlier designs, Pensive.

This is a model of a nude woman standing upright in a thoughtful pose. The problem I had originally was that when I printed it small enough to fit in the printer, some of the small features like the fingers just wouldn't print. 

My previous solution was to print the model in two halves and weld her back together afterwards. One beneficial side effect of doing this was that I could make the cut at exactly the point where the tips of the elbows start in the upper half. Now that I was able print the full height of the model in one go I realised I was going to need a different strategy for supporting the arms. I also took the opportunity to change the hairstyle for something a little more voluminous and impressive.

 Without a support structure below the elbows, the extruded filament would simply fall to the bed when the nozzle reached that point.

One method would be to turn on the support feature in the slicing software but this rather crude method would result in a large amount of additional material being placed in many unnecessary areas.

Instead I decided to try the latest version of Meshmixer which allows individual pillars to be placed, manually or automatically, underneath the areas that need supporting.

I didn't like the positions of the automatically placed supports and so I opted to add my own scaffolding exactly where it was needed.

Here is a picture of an early test piece, 175 mm tall with a rather excessive amount of support material still in place.

Having proved that the method worked, I decided to go for a larger version 250 mm tall. This one worked even better. Printed in white PLA at 0.2 mm layer height taking 19 hours.

 I think that this method of support placement could be extremely useful in future and should make it  possible to print many other difficult poses.