KDM
Member
Those of you who have your glasses on correctly will recognise this as not being a pen:
It is, in fact, a tray from a type of jewellery box called "Stackers." A colleague who knew I had an inclination to make pens had given me a phone and I asked if I could give him "something for it." He asked if I would make a pen for his wife which matched her Stackers jewellery boxes.
The first experiment was to photograph the material of the box, print it out and bed that in clear resin:
That was OKay, but not great. The CA glue soaked through the paper and made the image very dark. It looks like there are bubbles in the cast, but these are places where the resin doesn't appear to have adhered to the paper. Here's an article showing the cast blank.
At this point, he decided a perfume pen would be better, so it's a good job these blanks didn't work out, because they'd be the wrong size!
Experiment two was to try and duplicate the Stackers colours in a PR swirl:
The client was very happy with that and asked me to proceed. Except the next day, I produced these:
These were made by curing a few small blanks of the appropriate colours and then bedding them in a creamy coloured resin. These were very similar to the original pattern, and the one with the "hoops" was deemed perfect.
It's just as well, because past experience with perfume pens (indeed any pen which has a screw-on lid) shows that in order to look smart, the top and bottom have to be aligned. This is not a problem when there is no pattern to align.
Here's a YouTube video showing you round the swirly blank and the one with the diagonal insets.
Here is the resultant pen:
If you look closely, there is a kind of "aliased" effect, particularly noticable between the cream and the brown. (Aliasing is the effect you see if you look closely at a straight line drawn on a computer screen. You'll note that it has jagged edges because it's made up of dots.) This aliased pattern was made by the teeth on my bandsaw as I sliced the blocks of coloured PR. I'm very unhappy about it - I should have sanded them first.
For those of you who are still counting, this is pen number 11!
It is, in fact, a tray from a type of jewellery box called "Stackers." A colleague who knew I had an inclination to make pens had given me a phone and I asked if I could give him "something for it." He asked if I would make a pen for his wife which matched her Stackers jewellery boxes.
The first experiment was to photograph the material of the box, print it out and bed that in clear resin:
That was OKay, but not great. The CA glue soaked through the paper and made the image very dark. It looks like there are bubbles in the cast, but these are places where the resin doesn't appear to have adhered to the paper. Here's an article showing the cast blank.
At this point, he decided a perfume pen would be better, so it's a good job these blanks didn't work out, because they'd be the wrong size!
Experiment two was to try and duplicate the Stackers colours in a PR swirl:
The client was very happy with that and asked me to proceed. Except the next day, I produced these:
These were made by curing a few small blanks of the appropriate colours and then bedding them in a creamy coloured resin. These were very similar to the original pattern, and the one with the "hoops" was deemed perfect.
It's just as well, because past experience with perfume pens (indeed any pen which has a screw-on lid) shows that in order to look smart, the top and bottom have to be aligned. This is not a problem when there is no pattern to align.
Here's a YouTube video showing you round the swirly blank and the one with the diagonal insets.
Here is the resultant pen:
If you look closely, there is a kind of "aliased" effect, particularly noticable between the cream and the brown. (Aliasing is the effect you see if you look closely at a straight line drawn on a computer screen. You'll note that it has jagged edges because it's made up of dots.) This aliased pattern was made by the teeth on my bandsaw as I sliced the blocks of coloured PR. I'm very unhappy about it - I should have sanded them first.
For those of you who are still counting, this is pen number 11!
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