I have designed a dollhouse for my granddaughter and have been reading the forum to know how I am going to use my Glowforge to built it. I think I have most things figured out but I have a question for the beta testers working in acrylic. The doll house will have stained glass windows and I planned on creating the windows out of 1/16" acrylic but need some advice as how to get the stained glass look. With the alignment feature of the Glowforge I was thinking of etching the “leaded” potion of the glass on one side of the acrylic about 1/64" deep and then somehow turn that etched portion dark, (painting or ink) while etching the other side of the acrylic 1/64" for the colored glass and painting that area red and green or leaving the area frosted. Any advice you might have would help my planning. Everything has been drawn in SketchUp.
This looks interesting to me. The Wright windows definitely make a statement. What size would a finsihed window be in this scale? The different settings on engraving could do this. Not sure what type of paint or coloring you would need but that would be a neat challenge.
I don’t know what the right or best option is, but alcohol markers should color really well on acrylic, while still being somewhat transparent and fairly permanent. Dickblick sells them individually for a few bucks per marker for their brand, which I quite like.
Edit: I like these, but they also have normal chisel tip style markers too, like a sharpie, if you like those better.
And now that I think about it, sharpie makes brush tip markers too that would probably be transparent. They make oil based ones that would be opaque of you prefer that, but transparent feels more stained glassy to me.
Hey, thanks for that find! I’ll be looking for it–I think making mini stained glass windows could be a lot of fun (maybe with a flickering tea light behind it?)
Use covered acrylic, engrave in channels for the ‘lead’, then spray paint with a metallic paint. After that you can then put the piece back in the laser to do the rest of the engraves to frost the windows etc.
I imagine you’d get a similar look on the acrylic and, if you built up your mask a bit before lasering/painting, you might be able to get a slightly raised surface for proper leading texture.
I use this technique all the time. it works great. Another thing I use sometimes is engraving a channel deep enough and then laying more acrylic into it. He is using 1/16 though, and its hard to get anything thinner than that.
Cool project! The design team here has a thick waxy paint that they use to fill in engraves, that would work perfectly for the black part/leading. It’s called ‘fill in paint’ and comes in several colors but is definitely opaque. You could probably just use different colors of acrylic and glue them together for the other colors, but at that size it’s getting a bit tiny to work with. +1 on translucent paints for the red and green areas.
Another way to do the “leading” on your dollhouse window (once you get your Glowforge): design a rubber stamp of the window, stamp it on the acrylic with embossing ink, dust with embossing powder (also called thermography powder) which you can get in any color including gold and silver, heat set the powder with a heating tool. This will leave a raised design that you can flow the transparent colors into for a stained glass look.
