Black credit card pen w/ sparkle!

[ToddMR]

A friend of mine asked me to make a black small pen with silver in it. So I cast this blank a couple weeks ago using a combination of black oil paint, black pigment dye, and silver pigment dye. The result was a nice black pen that has silver sparkles when held in light. I painted the tubes black on this one. The picture was very hard for me to take, so I apologize for the quality. You can for sure see the sparkles under the light, almost looks like looking at the night sky. There is far more silver in the pen than I could capture with the camera. When he saw the pen he really liked it. This is on a chrome cc kit from PSI. Thanks for taking a look!

 

[seamus7227]

VERY WELL DONE TODD!!

 

[bitshird]

It Looks pretty nice Todd, the silver shows up in the photo, so I'll bet it really pops in good light. It's too bad a camera can't quite catch the subtleties that the Human Eye can.

 

[76winger]

Great looking pen!

To help bring out the sparkles in pens like this you really need lighting from multiple sides to optimize the reflectivity you get from the material.

As an example check out this photo I have on Flickr and note how the red one in the back shows a lot of its sparkle. It's got a light on top, one on each side and one above and to the front, so four all together.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/76winger/6098192099/

Each additional light will help bring the sparkle out, so you can likely get by on less than what I use in my booth. Be sure to keep multiple lights of the same wattage and color temperature so you don't throw off the white balance of your photos.

 

[OLDMAN5050]

it's pretty