andrew's handcut dyes

[andrew]

Two more coulda been better dye jobs.

The first is a Borg cube on a fuscia Champion Teebird. First, I did a purple cloud background with shaving cream. then, decided to not calculate dye delay times and left the second dip in WAY too long. Four dips total. Had to take a backlit pic otherwise it's mostly just a dark blob in the middle.



next, Zartan jumping over a Champion Glow Gator. All went excellent with the three stages of black (wish I'd taken a pic) but all went wrong when I recovered in vaseline (after the Elmer's glue fail) and added tan. Got impatient at the darkening of the first dip (two total) and turned up the heat slightly too much. The vaseline congealed into lumps and gave Zartan a camo effect which is actually kinda cool if I'd meant it. Worse, when I pulled off the contact paper, most of the Gator from the original Innova stamp pulled off with it....



Sure wish I'd done the right arm shading in darker tan like I did the left arm....

[andrew]

Luckily I bought two Champion Glow Gators, and decided to have another attempt at Zartan. SO much better:

[andrew]

Hadrosaur on a TeeRex. Green (I think four passes), then recovered with vaseline and redipped in tan (two passes). The hard thing about the vaseline is once you get it on there, you can't touch it at all while removing contact paper. I got my palm in it two or three times which created all sorts of weird, um, lets call them effects.

[andrew]

Did three discs today.

Fuse (turned out awesome mostly because of the simple, comic-like drawing):



Buzzz to replace the other Barca-themed Buzzz that I threw in a river last week. Hand-cutting block lettering is HARD.



QJLS:

[Flipflat]

Awesome

Nice Hadrosaur too.

[andrew]

After viewing a bunch of lackluster Vulcans on DGCR's meta-art thread (I don't remember what the topic is actually titled), I found an old Star Vulcan in my closet. No idea how it got there, but I put a Vulcan Commandship on it. Now I guess it goes back in my closet....

[lewa]

Looks awesome. Use more contrast; your darkest tones should be much darker IMO.

[andrew]

Thanks for the input! It's hard to be predictive about how dark the darkest tones are going to get, as, in this case, I did 4 dips, and you have to guess how much darker the first one is going to be after the following three. To be honest, I was surprised the first dip wasn't a little darker by the end, but I like how the following dips turned out, so in retrospect it woulda been an easy fix to make the first one darker. But I didn't want it black.

Also, the photo washes out the contrast a bit more than it is in person. But I agree, first dip coulda used 3 more minutes....

[andrew]

Tooled Glow Wizard:

[andrew]

Recent creations:

Champ Rhyno (I'm kinda lazy about it, but it's really hard to get the ghost stamp off of well-used discs):


Eagle Lunar Lander Module on a Star EagleX. Kind of an artistic interpretation aka I wasn't paying any attention to what the thing actually looks like while cutting shapes.


Blind Melon S/T album cover on a Buzz with one of those stupid way-too-busy graphics that doesn't come off for anything (but I think it turned out funny as a backdrop). This is a good example that, for me anyway, making thick, cartoon lines work best.


I also put a bust of Nikola Tesla with a shaving cream galaxy background on a Surge but it's kinda stupid and I didn't even take a picture. Shoulda put one of his gadgets on instead.

[andrew]

Thought I'd post a follow-up on why I stopped dyeing discs. They're a lot of work for basically a photo-op, because the dye bleeds and looks blurry after awhile. Also, the reason I started was to make discs more visible, but these days I've gotten a lot pickier about what color discs I buy, which solves that issue. Finally, although i like the idea of personalizing discs, they tend to end up in the closet and worthless because nobody else wants my personalized discs, or lost, which at least leaves hope that someday I will see some sucker throwing one so I can at least point out the phone number on the back....

Anyway, here's what three dyes look like on three different plastics after about a year:


Glow Wizard- look closely and you'll see it's the disc that's my avatar.


Z Pred- if it wasn't for the ink still being there, you'd think this was an out-of-focus photo.


Star Teebird- okay, this one is still kinda cool... and now I'm thinking the original post is too small to see it's now a lot blurrier, but anyway, there ya go.