Additive Manufacturing (AM) represents a maturing collection of production technologies also known as rapid prototyping, rapid manufacturing or three-dimensional (3D) printing. One of the most promising aspects of AM is the possibility to create complex geometries. Despite a growing body of knowledge concerning the technological challenges, there is a lack of methods and tools that allow designers to effectively deal with the new possibilities of AM.Recently, several sub 5000 AM printers have come to the market. Initiatives from the open-source community contribute to this development. These inexpensive machines are based on the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technology.In order to investigate the relationship of the FDM process and the built structures, this paper presents experiments to model and build FDM-specific structures that hold unique mechanical and visual properties.The findings show that inexpensive FDM machines are able to manufacture complex shapes and patterns in order to achieve unique mechanical and visual properties. However, for a designer to control these phenomena, solid-modeling must be combined with tool path generation. Unfortunately adequate tools and methods that integrate these two approaches are nonexistent.