How to get some color in your acrylic

So I would like to add some color to my acrylic. So far I have used acrylic paint to fill in some engravings. There is some that have come out looking good but others not so much. It just doesn’t seem consistent And it’s very time consuming. So I thought of some other ideas and wanted to see if people had tried them or done something else that I’m not thinking about.

  1. Prime the acrylic with a color and engrave the paint off.

  2. Two tone acrylic. I’ve been looking at inventables and found it on there website. Thing is that it’s kind of pricy and sometimes they don’t have the colors I’m looking for.

  3. Make your own two tone acrylic. I also saw that they sell acrylic in .022 sheets. Could you bond that on top another piece then engrave?

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I engraved my acrylic and then spray painted it before removing the masking,

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They are on the inside so no danger of scratching there.

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I think #1 would well. No input on #2. If you go with #3, I’d recommend test-test-test, and don’t make really thick pieces to laser. I just made dominos with a piece .22 thick, and had to make three passes to finally make the cut.

If I wanted a 2-tone effect, I’d just cut out identical pieces from 1/8" acrylic and use an acrylic cement. Unless I’m working with clear/transparent, it cant’ be seen if you’re careful.

Oh weird, I didn’t intend to post the scratching bit, just the whole thread so OP could see how they used alcohol inks to color their acrylic.

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I really like the alcohol ink for colors, I pre-color mirror acrylic and then laser them. I have never tried filling and engrave with alcohol ink after the fact. I wonder if it would stress crack? By far I prefer to color the substrate (acrylic, wood, etc) then laser it, since I don’t like messing with fiddly details ;p Btw, I use mirror acrylic for coloring because it bounces light through the color, which makes it glow. Alcohol ink on white acrylic is okay, but has to be highly diluted or it gets too dark!

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With alcohol ink is that expensive? Could you post some pics of where you used these paints.

Here is one of my posts about my acrylic puzzles!

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