Making my acrylic charms

I feel terrible for not putting out any new content, so here's a quick little art blog.

I'm sure you all at some point either through the blog, Facebook or real life have seen the charms I made, or saw them at some stage of development. What I'm going to do is let you all know the process behind making them. If there's ever a demand for it at all, I can go more in-depth on how to do various steps, but for now I'll do an outline.

This is the process for each individual character charm. This was repeated around 40 times.

Not all of the steps have pictures, sorry!



Step 1:
Draw something!

Step 2:
Scan and save.

Step 3:
Create black and white files to make the next step easier. One file being outline, one being b+w lines.

Step 4:

Vectorise both files in Inkscape. Resize images. Overlay and group.

Step 5:

Create a sheet for characters, grouped by colour. Save as .svg (for editing) and .pdf (for sending to printer).

Step 6:

Peel the backing off and wash and dry each piece to clean the dust off.

Step 7:

Cover each piece thoughrally with Sharpee marker, leave to dry.

Step 8:

Clean off surface marker, leaving just the lines filled in.

Step 9:

Use chemical bonding to carefully attach the laser cut characters onto the backplates (cut separately.. and in BULK)

Step 10:

Add on pearls/sparkles one by one, place Mod-Podge along edge of character and sprinkle with glitter, leave to dry and dust off. Add lobster lanyard!

It was a very lengthy process and was not short of pitfalls, I also got a fair amount of chemical bonding agent directly in the flesh thanks to the precise applicator. It was an interesting idea to try and a great way to get started on mass, self-made merchandise, however it wasn't as customizable as I'd have liked.

I have a lot of this stock left, over 100 pieces, so for next Q-con they will be part of the honesty box area. I have my sights set on a new type of charm making that should open up a lot more possibilities to me and I can't wait to get started on tests as soon as I have a bit more time and am feeling a bit better physically.

If at any point people want a tutorial on how to do the Inkscape steps, or any of the other ones for that matter, I'd be more than happy to make an in-depth tutorial.