large scale UV painting on my shade structure?!

serra · Post by **serra** » Wed Nov 29, 2006 10:54 am

any advice would be greatly appriciated!

for 2007 we're going to be building a fancy schmancy shade structure and i'm the designated UV paint smearer. i want to do some large scale murals on the inside and outsides of the walls of our structure so my questions are as follows;

MATERIAL: what sort of fabric would you recommend? i know something that is breathable is best (to keep the temp down in the day i would like to use something that will be very durable and will stand up to a week of dust storms and mutants.

PAINT/DYE: keep in mind i said UV... i want the whole thing to be UV responsive. i've used acryllic UV paint before but it was was [i]very [/i]expensive and not that good of quality. i don't mind paying a bit but i am going to need this in large quantities and would like it to actually turn out well. i am thinking of doing a basecoat in a non UV, more economical paint and then doing the top layer in UV, and then finnishing off with a high powered finisher. (i don't need paint flakes moopin up the place, thanks!)

i'm also thinking about some sort of dye... perhaps dying the whole surface one UV tone and then painting upon that... any ideas as to how one might go about making UV dye? i've got something of a mad scientist helping with me and he said he'd probably be able to figure something out...

also not entirely sure what sort of paint would be best... i mentioned i've used acryllic before - including that stuff you can add to it to make it better for painting on fabric. but what if i can come up with the chemicals to make something glow UV (safely of course, not just going to dump plutonium all over everything) and just add that to a huge bucket of tempra paint? or latex??

so yes! any one who might have some advice / guidance for me would be greatly appriciated! :)

geekster · Post by **geekster** » Wed Nov 29, 2006 11:42 am

If you are going to use paint, use a WHITE undercoat for best results or use a white fabric. As for dyes, paints, pigments, there are several. Some present no or little color to visible light, others have a color similar to their UV response color in visible light.

This site has a lot of UV paints, dyes, inks, and pigment powders:

http://riskreactor.com/

I would think a tye-dye with UV reactive dye would possibly be spectacular.

Good luck!

pbmaniac2000 · Post by **pbmaniac2000** » Wed Nov 29, 2006 7:08 pm

I think something that would be extremely cool would be if you did a chromadepth uv painting. Log story short you wear special glasses(like the cheap paper 3d glasses) and when you put them on they flip the color spectrum so certain colors pop out at you. It turns a normal uv painting into a 3-d master piece. We have used it at my haunted house before and people were amazed by it. So you can view it with or without the glasses. Its just an idea, but is extremely cool and the only extra expense would be cheap paper glasses.

Here is one company that sells the glasses. The also do a much better job of explaining than me.

http://www.chromatek.com/index.html

Fire Freak

MikeVDS · Post by **MikeVDS** » Wed Nov 29, 2006 8:48 pm

I've seen that at haunted houses. It's crazy. Flat painted surfaces seem to be floating out of the surface. I walked along ground painted with flowers and I kept trying to grab one. Crazy stuff.

Tiahaar · Post by **Tiahaar** » Wed Nov 29, 2006 9:31 pm

Some excellent camp over on 4:30 last year had a beautiful gallery of this kind of art in their pavilion...it was cool without the glasses even but with, the images jumped right out at you!

Zane5100 · Post by **Zane5100** » Thu Jan 11, 2007 8:01 am

Rosco makes some good fluorescent paint that is designed for scenic artwork and it's reasonable in price. However, the biggest concern to have is the density of paint on fabric--especially when the wind comes up.

I've found that large amounts of paint on fabric will start flaking off after a period of time, leading to fluorescent MOOP downwind of you. Also, if your canvas is large enough, it'll basically be a sail, so you need to keep that in mind in regards to anchoring and reinforcing so it can stand +100 mph wind gusts.

Dye would be safer from a MOOP perspective, but you still have the wind issue to contend with.

I'd get some small amount of paint and dye and then do some test swatchs outside to see how they weather. As to what to use for fabric, you may have to look at something like they use for the Center Camp roof and then I think you'll be stuck with dyes for the most part.

BTW, what are you using for a UV source?