Gold Leafing MakerBotted Objects
Vandebina found a way to turn MakeBotted objects into gold… well at least covered in gold! She did it at Miss Baltazar’s Laboratory at Metalab in Vienna. I asked her how she did it and this is what she said!
I demonstrated four different types of gilding a surface. The one with the makerbotted cup is a kind of oil gilding. You have to coat the surface with varnish or an oil-based gold size (oil/resin) that will dry and develop a tacky surface. The oil that i use is known as Mixtion. After the drying time (12 hours) you just have to apply the gold leaves. To protect the surface it can be painted with some acrylic finish, or whatever you want.
There are also other ways to gild the surface —> gilding milk as clay, it takes just 10-15 minutes to dry. The next weeks i will try to gild makerbotted things with galvanic method, the first tests failed. But i’m on it. heh!
Thanks Vandebina! Keep us posted with future experiments!
| Tagged with | One comment | |
One Comment so far
Ann Marie Shillito
Thank you, Vandebina, for sharing your methods and materials. Decorating and treating the surfaces of 3D printed objects can turn prototypes into even more desirable objects. Here is the photograph of one of my very first pieces in ABS http://bit.ly/b2hd0J. This bangle has 3 rotating rings which have been painted with acrylic and decorated with gold leaf. The sheen of the burnished leaf really emphasises the texture created by the build process which is important to me. The rings can be turned to change the pattern, and the other side has different colours and more structured pattern.