Watched “Making Contact” on the Nature channel yesterday and was inspired by the incredibly beautiful octopus. (Totally worth a watch!) Had some scrap acrylic and spray paint laying around and I ended up working on these til the wee morning. I really adore the look of painted acrylic.
The tentacles, boat and waves were black and white images I found online and I didn’t draw them; I just heavily reworked them into a file and put them together. The brightly colored octopus and waves were broken up into numerous individual engravings so the could be painted individually.
Thanks Christy. There’s something about painting the back of clear acrylic that seems to make the glow. It’s probably has to do with the light passing through it or something, but hell if I know. I just think it’s pretty.
The process isn’t really technical actually and is just a bit time consuming. Clear acrylic with spritzes of spray paint for the background and then engrave over the paint. For the brightly colored one I broke up the tentacles and waves into about 8 different engraves.
Engrave>paint>dry>engrave>paint>dry> over and over again…
The tricky part is getting good with the spray paint as you need a pretty light hand, but that’s just practice really.
Nice work! I get the "Engrave>paint>dry>engrave>paint>dry> over and over again " work flow. That makes sense. From the engrave perspective though, I assume you only engraved very gently so as to only remove the paint layer. Anything too deep would “blur” the clear acrylic. It seems to me that even lightly engraved clear acrylic would make some of the color harder to see or is that part of the effect somehow? Your insight is appreciated!
