Marbling paint onto vinyl tarp experiment.

A piece of backlit vinyl tarp is prepped with sanding and then I threw a bunch of marine paint on it and mixed it around with a palette knife. The paint is System Three's WR-LPU paint. I know that it is over-mixed and actually not that good looking at all. Next time I'll plan it out. There are a lot of videos out there showing interesting marbleizing/paint-over-water prints, a.k.a. ebru technique. Example

My main goal is to see if I can get good adherence. This paint peels off in one big, flexible layer if the substrate is not well-sanded. I'll sew it into a wallet if the paint sticks well enough.

Update: I tried to put it on my Cricut Expressions cutter, but the slight differences in height between painted and unpainted caused the wallet to skip as it cut, ruining it. My conclusion is that hand cutting would be better when using this type of painted tarp for wallets. 

Custom Bicycle Panniers

A client emailed me asking if I'd do custom panniers. I jumped at the chance because I wanted to get data on a number of things, like using marine paint on adhesive-backed vinyl, and designing and working with decals. It's given me a lot of information on how to estimate for future custom jobs.

My client liked Art Nouveau, and Mid Century Modern. So I did up some drawings of various possibilities for those styles in Adobe Illustrator and we went back and forth on the designs. The next step was the backgrounds for the tarps, so I pulled out many of my tarps, photographed them and emailed so she could pick from that, Photoshopping the decals over the tarps. She went with the mostly-tan color you see here.

It was a bit challenging getting the decal colors right. I'm going to make up a palette of the colors I can create with the System Three WR-LPU topcoat I have, for future work.

I'll make a page on my website for custom work as a happy result of this project.

Painting on adhesive-backed vinyl

I had to answer the question of whether adhesive-backed vinyl could be painted successfully before cutting. I'm using WR-LPU topcoat, a marine coating. The surface of the vinyl was sanded first and cleaned with a damp rag before painting. I mixed primary colors to make the desired colour. I was attempting fuscia but ended up close, but not quite there.

This picture shows the result after I stuck the letters onto some clear vinyl.

So, the home crafter can now attain just about any color of adhesive backed vinyl with a little bit of paint mixing. It would be great if System Three made "cool" primaries like light lemon yellow and a lighter blue, or CMYK primaries so home paint mixing would yield a greater range of colors. In my acrylic painting course we had three "cool" primaries and three "warm" primaries, and along with black and white, were all the colours needed to mix any desired colour.