Pad Printing at Home?

I tried it! It took a lot of trial and error, and the results are mostly a bit sketchy.

 

Attempting this gave me new respect for our very talented pad print artists out there. (CB, I'm looking at you)!

 

I used the butterfly on one brick because it is the plate with the finest detail. The striped plate was used to demonstrate a pattern, but doing it with the black paint (which is too thin) meant lots of brick showing through (it still looks pretty neat IRL, but far from perfect. And of course, I had to demo on a Brickarm too.

 

But back to the method itself, some of the challenges I had to overcome:

 

Getting the right paint is critical - I thought I could use supplies on hand, but I ended up ordering special paint in white. You can tell that it prints much better than the black. But here's the thing - the paint can't be too thick or too thin or the image will either blur or transfer incompletely. Then it has to dry in the right amount of time. If it dries too fast, you'll get no print transfer. And since it's a single, very thin layer, it has to be very pigmented, so you can't just water down paint that's not the right consistency.

 

The first kit I bought had a silicone pad that was way too slick and firm. You can't get around any curves if the pad won't bend enough and it didn't want to leave the imprint on plastic at all. Even with a softer pad on a Brickarm, it wasn't flexible enough to get into the recesses. I only had success on smooth areas.

 

On a good, clean transfer, the result is an even, thin coat of paint that is slightly raised to the touch. For durability, it is about the same as paint - useful for display or light play only.

Real pad printers, I think, use special inks that set under heat or light to make them vastly more durable.

 

Plate (design) selection is very limited too - there just aren't that many designs

or patterns small enough to use on Lego and the vast majority of them are not things most builders and customizers would find useful.

 

 

So what is this good for? The only good use I can imagine is factions. If you found a symbol you liked, you could transfer it consistently onto figures, bricks and accessories.

 

And here's the doozie...where did I get little plates and silicone pads?

 

Well...there are kits for "stamping" fingernail designs that are really just an at-home version of pad printing by hand. You get steel plates with 6 or 7 designs engraved on each, a silicone pad and special paint to work with the kit (regular fingernail polish doesn't work well at all). It's

not very expensive, but then again, the results aren't exactly stellar!

 

-Bebs

Done