More dye adventures with Zonda Journey, Zephyr Slip alt deco
Okay, this is going to be a bit text heavy and process oriented, and there's no snazzy new design to show off, just sharing my process a bit as it develops.
April wanted her copy of Zephyr Slip in custom colors, so following Transformers redeco tradition, Zephyr now has a sister, Zonda Journey. (The Zonda is a wind from the mountains in Argentina, though far to the west of the locale where Austroraptor was discovered.)
The build was a mixed success but a learning experience in my pursuit of a dying process that results in uniform, predictable, and durable color.
Aside from a more stable kickstand, Zonda's design didn't change much from Zephyr's. For ease of dying and painting, the scooter floor, wing insets, and nasal / maxilla area were all separate pieces this time and glued into place with two-part epoxy, but not much else has changed in the model.
The build does differ from Zephyr Slip in that several of Zonda's joints use clear polyurethane rods in place of ABS ones, most importantly in the feet and tail. These have to be threaded into place and cut, but they're compliant, so while posing is a little spongy, they support more weight with more stability and absorb some shock, making the figure less likely to tip over from bumping the shelf.
But back to the dyes. Details like the inside of Zonda's headlights and taillights, and her claw emblem, pinstripes, face details, and rims are painted, and as usual she has paper decals for her eyes and console. But the bulk of her color, everything magenta, purple, or black, is dyed. I'm going to work through those in reverse order here, black, purple, magenta.
Some of the black parts were printed in stock black resin, like the wheels, but I've had difficulty with failed prints using it, and elements like the black sections of the tail and head where I've used white resin and dyed it black end up with a uniform, more satin finish, so I think that I'm going to prefer that method from now on.
Using black ink for brushed-in details like the shoe treads works, but it's risky, because the ink can sometimes find the grain of the printed surface and wick away where I don't want it. Anywhere I intend to do this on future models will require a deep trench in the model to capture the ink, similar to the grooves used for Zonda's pinstriping seen on the part above.
Zonda's darker purple elements could have been more uniform with a couple more tries. Brushing the ink on with any color but black leaves a patchy, cloudy surface, and dying in a bath requires far too much ink. Workbenchmaniac suggested using an airbrush to apply the ink, and that seems to work very well, with a lot less waste than a bath and much more uniform results than brushing, so with a bit more practice, that might be my go-to method for dying parts, especially with a layer of clearcoat on top as here.
Zonda's magenta parts were simply printed in color, but I ran into a novel problem right away that I didn't solve at all: she was never intended to be magenta in the first place. The dyed liquid resin was lavender.
I already knew from working on Nova that dying liquid resin would really only work for pastel colors, and that the color after curing wouldn't quite match the liquid form. Nova's pink was also a little less punchy and fluorescent after printing. But I wasn't prepared for the wild swing around the color wheel this dye underwent with printing and curing.
I've read that alcohol dyes are ironically susceptible to UV photodegradation, but I'm not convinced that's what's at work here. In fact, all of Zonda's headlights and taillights have clear UV resin poured in and cured in place after painting, which means that areas of both the magenta and the surface-dyed purple have been exposed to much longer UV blasting with no visible effect.
So I've learned some things from this process. I think the most reliable tools in my kit in relation to dye are brushed black dye and airbrushed everything else. Airbrushing gives me bright and predictable colors, and with practice I can make them pretty uniform. Black dye, which is always uniform and can go over any other color, is a handy tool for detailing as long as the model is prepared with grooves to control the spread. And breaking elements down into parts that can be dyed separately continues to be a reliable and useful step that saves much more workbench time than it takes in Blender time.
As for Zonda Journey, I have a lot of things to improve on for next time, but I'm reasonably happy with the result for now, and April is happy with her, which is what counts.
