Making the journal has been an adventure. It needs to be extremely rugged, and also strange. Early on, I settled on the idea of carving the words into sheets of metal. After buying a bunch of samples, I settled on 0.08” 6061-T6 aluminum. It’s extremely rigid and light. Aluminum is also soft, so easy to carve with a CNC machine. Back in November, Kate wrote the text of the journal. I started cutting pages.
As seems to often be the case in such things, half of the work was making a fixture to hold the pages in place. The CNC mill I’m using has a travel area of 4” x 6”, so each page’s text fits in that area. The page, though, needs to be bigger. This means the pocket the page fits into to hold it in place needs to be 5”x7”, which is larger than the mill’s travel area. So it needs to be 4 separate cuts. Cutting steel is slow and much less tolerant of bad settings. I shattered two tools by cutting too slowly: insufficient chips to shed heat caused the tool to heat up and break. I came back to find the mill continuing on its way, but the end of the broken tool was 1 inch above the material and there were blue and golden chips (from the tool) among the grey ones.
I’ve had the completed pages for about a month now, and been working on how to present them. Just aluminum sheets is shiny, but then it’s clear they’re metal and they’re actually a bit hard to read: the edges of the carved letters reflect the light and so the letters seem to shimmer a bit. My goal is that the surface of the page is a strange color, the letters are dark (in contrast), and that the page is laquered heavily. So it feels kind of familiar (lacquer), the coloration and material properties seem foreign.
For coloration, Sarah pointed me to iridescent pigments that change color based on the direction of the light. These pigments come in lots of glittering and vibrant colors. It’s easy to color a page: you can spray paint it white, to give a base coat for the color, and sprinkle the pigment on the wet paint.
The problem, though, is how you make the letters black. I tried India ink, but it dyes the paint as well. I tried inking the letters first, putting wax on top of them, then coloring the page.
The idea was I could melt the wax off and reveal the letters. The paint, though, seals the wax in, and heating it enough to wipe the wax away also wipes away the paint:
Caroline works with metals and pigments a lot, and had a great idea: dissolve black pigment in mineral oil, then spray varnish on top to keep it in place. Mineral oil is great because it won’t stain anything, is cheap, and doesn’t dry. So you can keep on cleaning and applying until it looks good. In this approach, I color the pages first.
I then paint over the letters using mineral oil with black pigment in it, wipe off the excess oil, then varnish.
After the varnish dries, I apply a thick layer of lacquer. Here’s the result on some test pages with blue and red pigment:
They look great! The letters fade away a bit on the top left corners of the left and right pages because they were a little to shallow and the white paint filled them in (this is why these are test pages, they’re discards). I have about a half dozen colors to use on different pages, and the pattern of pigments on each one will be unique. I’m now ready to drill the binding holes on the book pages, and paint them!
Phil
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