Sanded Acrylic

[Martin Boekers]

Just curious if anyone here has experimented with this. (about in the middle of the page)

http://www.engraversjournal.com/article.php/2765/index.html

It says they use an Acrylic dye before sanding, it gives a nice effect.

Any tips or preferences to dyes?

Thanks!

[Gary Hair]

I haven't done that with acrylic but I did use the technique on some large Corian pieces I did a few weeks ago. They were 18" x 18" and had lots of small text, 14, 16 and 18pt. I simply lasered a bit deeper than usual, scraped in acrylic paint, let it dry and then sanded. Because they wanted a semi-matte finish, I wet sanded up to 220 grit and finished with 220 dry.

Make sure your sander is fairly new or you'll end up with distinguishable patterns, you don't want that.

Gary

[Frank Corker]

I have used that method before to leave the etched background and black infill. I didn't use a dye, I used acrylic paint, but the method is exactly the same. It's a funny thing with acrylic, it's very robust when it comes to sanding down, however the polished surfaces only take a small amount to scratch it.