Friendly flyer
Well-Known Member
Just a point worth noting that the laser printer technique doesn’t work on colour lasers or larger more office orientated models, because they use toner that fuses at a much higher temperature and you can’t then get that toner to melt again with a laminator or iron.
At my office we have a huge colour printer with toner. I used it, and it actually worked! It may be that our laminator is a bit hotter than usual? I also have cheap home printer, so I'm well set up (if only I could find the cable...)
You can get decent real gold leaf sheets on Amazon (.co.uk at least) for about £5 for 20 sheets of 4.5cm x 4.5cm leaf. I’ve used it for a holy grail replica and I’m working on my own book binding project with some as well. I’m currently also looking for a good way to do a book title in gold on a leather spine that doesn’t involve me buying a hot stamping set. I was wondering if making a stencil and then using that to apply gold size and leaf that would work, one way to find out I guess!
I went and bought some faux leaf gold at the local art store for about the same price as you. It's a brass-aluminium compound that I hope will look OK. Fake gold was used back in the day anyway, so as long as it doesn't have the "sweets wrapper plastic" gold look, I guess I'm good.
There's several sorts of toner pens that can be bought in crafts stores that gold will adhere to. Here's a video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCMYx8zpaT0
The trick is to get the toner on to the leather, right? The problem is one can't get the leather through the printer, but if the toner is on, I guess an iron will get the gold to stick. Would a combination of stencil and toner pen do the trick?
If I'm pleased with the gold, I think I'll go for making labels in elephant hide paper. The paper will go through the printer, and comes in all kinds of leathery shades. I was planning on using my trusty permanent marker to give it a proper colour and then ad letters via the printer. As long as the label only covers a small area, I don't think it will stick out as obviously fake.
Eventually I guess I'll have to buy a letter punch set on Aliexpress though...