Is it possible to dye parts without boiling/heating up the RIT Dye/water/acetone mix? If so, does the mix need more, less, an equal amount of any of the 3 key ingredients (RIT Dye, water, acetone), or an extra ingredient? The reason I ask is because if I boil the mix, I fear that the plastic will warp and become ruined!
Hopefully someone who is more of an expert can answer the question for you, as I have never died anything. But from what I have read on other web sites, boiling the water is supposed to let the dye seep further into the part allowing it to "take" better. I have asked a few preliminary questions about dying and found that you can dye a part more than once. I was throwing around a concept I had in my head... Everyone has said that you can only dye a part with a darker color than your base. We're taught in school that white is made up of all the colors of the color wheel and black is the absence of color. I asked someone from here who started a dye thread about the possibility of dying a figure with multiple colors to create "white" allowing ultimately to dye a figure a lighter color. He intimated to me that the concept of white being made up of all colors applied to light, and not pigments. I disagree on a basic level because all color is, is our eyes perception of different light, so pigments or light the result should be the same, but since I've never dyed anything, I cannot disprove what he's said. He did also point out that there is no such thing as a "white dye" so just dying a figure white to lighten it would be out of the question. I do know that Rit makes a "brightener" that is supposed to help take 'off white' clothing and bring it closer to white, but how such a thing would work on a non-fabric application is unknown to me as well. One more thing to add is I came across a pretty good color chart on a die cast devoted web site: Hot World Customs - Dying Cars Of course I don't want to make assumptions, but it stands to reason that those colors would only dye like that on a white figure. I would think that the final color is based on the color you start with, but again I have never dyed a figure. I would love to have some of these questions answered myself. Mathius
The guy was right 100%. Light is made of all colors and when light refracts from a surface that is a certain color/pigment, it's wavelength will be changed and our eyes will decode that change as the color of the surface. You won't find white and black in nature. What people mostly perceive as black is either a very dark brown, green, or blue color.
It sounds more like you're agreeing with me than him. Maybe I didn't write out my original summarization clearly enough. I agree with everything you said. HE was saying that there is a difference between light and pigments in terms of the black/white concepts. I maintain there is no difference because pigments have to do with light as well. It's the same thing. Whether or not my practical theory is sound I don't know. If you could dye a figure multiple times to make it white for a base, then you could dye it whatever color you wanted. The question is how many times would you have to dye it to get white? What combination would work? Would that many dips in the dye make the figure brittle? I don't have the answers to these question. Mathius
Hey Mathius, I'm sure its the same thing as with mixing paint. Have you tried mixing all colors of paint? What you great is an ugly brown/grey color. Which is what you'll get mixing dyes. What these guys are saying is the medium of light only blends to white. So guess what, you have to use actual LIGHT to get the white from mixing. Which means using different colored lenses from a projector and overlapping those lenses. Since the medium is not light, its a no go. There you go, cannot mix dyes to get white. No one's stopping you from trying, but we are telling you that you are a little confused, and if you don't believe us, you can look it up elsewhere.
I AM confused. Colors don't exist without light, so I don't understand the difference between light and pigment. You can't have color without light. Mathius
Dude, colors exist without light. It is just that WE cannot perceive colors without light. That's the main point of all this.
No, colors do not exist without light since color IS visual perception of light. Color - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Also: "Pigments are chemicals that selectively absorb and reflect different spectra of light. When a surface is painted with a pigment, light hitting the surface is reflected, minus some wavelengths. This subtraction of wavelengths produces the appearance of different colors. Most paints are a blend of several chemical pigments, intended to produce a reflection of a given color." Even if there IS no possibility of mixing paints to create white, I want to know _why_. I am tempted to do some experiments myself if not for wasting paint. One poster already pointed out that mixing a bunch of colors together can produce gray. Gray is a neutral color of the black and white spectrum. What happens when you mix equal amounts of secondary colors? What do you think we're talking about? If you accept the rule that you can only dye a part in a color DARKER than the color you started with, then the possibility of finding a way to make the base dye lighter is DEFINITELY beneficial and DEFINITELY all related to dyeing. If you want to argue that nobody besides me attempted to answer his question about boiling water, then that I'll buy, but in the meantime we're still talking about dyeing parts. Mathius
I think Frenzy_Rumble has dyed a TF without boiling water....could be wrong though....maybe he'll chime in and say so or not. I do know it has been done without boiling water, I'm just unsure of the process, but for some reason, I believe that the process of doing so took days of said tf setting in dye bath as opposed to minutes in boiling water dye bath. I've only done it with boiling water, and yes it you aren't careful, you can ruin/warp pieces.
