After my 24 hrs of waiting on ink to cure on my decal... I found a few things that have made a change up to my endeavor. The sheet is water proof and holds the ink excellent. Now the issues that I must work with... The sticky glue seems to be translucent and throws off a light blue glow when the backing is peeled off. Which is unsettling, but when returned to a white substrate, the bluish tent and glow is subdued to nothing. Weird! Very gummy sticky, similar to the Avery Clear Matte shipping labels, but more tacky and will leave residue on some surfaces, like doubling up (piggy backing) labels. Very glossy and a soft feel, easy to show surface scratches, in angled light.
Here is a run down between the two label /sticker sheets.
AVERY: Clear Matte, perfect sticky side ( Wish all labels used the sticky glue), that will not effect image quality on clear substrates. Will show mirror image in sharp detail (better than the print side) when viewed from reverse. Matte surface is a thin film that is easy to damage (lifts off the vinyl). You must adjust saturation and contrast levels to print bold, as the matte coating mutes the color image, other than black. The big issue is the difficulty in printing a proper imagr reproduction, and the durability of the matte film coating.
AIVA: Frosty Clear semi-transparent sheets, gummy sticky side, which can leave residue. Image quality is excellent, just too shiney and the vinyl is a bit soft, and unable to hide minor surface scratches from angled light. An odd thing is that it seems to radiate light in blue tint when on clear surfaces. You can see a faint glow when light is directed at an angle at any cut edge of the label, which makes it similar to having its own back lighting, akin to sci-fi glass display screens. Kind of cool, if your willing to work with thin plexi-glass or other clear materials as a backing for stability.
My testing with the labels abilities, have made another option for my custom lighting's functionality. Because air bubbles are prone with this label, due to its unwieldy nature with sticky side, and the water proof and ink retension properties, I will double up (piggy back) the labels, doing the tinted glass method. A light amount of liquid soap and water, mist to cover the top of applied label, to allow the second application to cover without trapping air in pockets, and allow easier alignment.
I have not bothered with any more images of the labels, as this has grown into a broad experimentation, so to speak. Keeping my thread within the subject's boundries.
I did change my mandible tip... after playing around with looks and details with the toy mandible and the 3D printed greeble mandible tips from 308 Bits, my intial design needed more depth without making it too pointy. So a new structural and simplistic design was needed. Most of the details are already baked into the toy mandible tips, and my original was adding too much detail for what it needed to be. So here is my new version, which I need to clean up, as I had a bad fight with super glue and rounded off a corner or two. Once corrected, a base coat of epoxy paint to ready it for creating a mold.
Back side
Top side
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