• 9 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: September 2nd, 2024

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  • scribbler@lemmy.worldOPtoArt Share🎨@lemmy.worldJoshua Tree
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    3 days ago

    Absolutely! So the metal is titanium, and the whole piece is submerged in a dilute electrolyte (baking soda is the MVP here). The entire plate gets charged up to 200V, then I use a pen plotter to bring my pen/cathode (ground) within a few hundred microns of the plate and let the current start flowing. At this point, everything affects the colors you get (temperature of bath, dwell time of cathode, conductivity of bath, spacing between my pen and the plate) because all of these factors affect how thick the anodized layer beneath the pen will be.

    The physics of what color you get from a given thickness of anodized material is pretty well characterized already, my shtick is being able to locally control the anodization to make pictures like I’ve been posting.

    Here’s a link to a terribly edited YouTube video I put up a few weeks ago on the process: https://youtu.be/xYB1iIjg5u0

    And I also have a crude website at https://www.tiprints.com/



  • scribbler@lemmy.worldOPtoArt Share🎨@lemmy.worldU Jelly?
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    3 days ago

    Thank you so much! Yes, the color comes from alterations from light reflection. It’s difficult to describe, but the changes in color you get from viewing angle aren’t as strong as what you get from a soap bubble, but they are definitely there. If you think of the colors you can get from this process in a spectrum, viewing angle can give you about a half step up or half step down. The spectrum runs from: tan, brown, deep blue, light blue, yellow, magenta, light blue again, purple, green, pearl scent.

    I’ve found lighting makes a huge difference though - diffuse lighting like what I have around the house is great. I’ve got some prints hanging in a gallery that only has spot lights, for those you have to make sure there is a path for the light to bounce off the spotlight into your eyes or the whole print just looks faded and grey.


















  • scribbler@lemmy.worldOPtoArt Share🎨@lemmy.worldTitanium Sunset
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    4 months ago

    Very similar! Both colors are formed by oxide layers on the surface, I think with stainless steel it’s a mixture of iron and chrome oxides. In the case of titanium there is only one oxide, TiO2, which is transparent crystal (in thin forms). The TiO2 layer is thin, on the order of hundreds of nanometers so the colors you see are a result of light waves constructively and destructively interacting with the transparent layer of TiO2 on the surface of the titanium sheet.