I was so much happier with this one. At this stage though, I intended on cracking off the teeth and re-poring them to create teeth that looked cracked/layered with translucency... and I would have done so, if I hadn't accidentally caused my vacuum formed piece to bubble. I was applying the PVA (so I could re-poor the acrylic and have the acrylic stick only to the teeth I had stressed with the Dremel. I was going to go over them with the original semi-transparent acrylic to get a real light-shine-trough-from-behind look) when my vacuum formed piece bubbled. Maybe it was the condensation you can see below, or the cold room and warm hair-dryer.. either way.... It was back to the vacuum form machine for me!
At this stage, I began to be time-poor. Re-doing all these pieces began to take their toll. I decided to scrap that idea, and just do the straightforward procedure. I'll save the fancy stuff for another time.
So onward to my second poor of the white/yellow tinted acrylic.
I had holes in my gums in several places.. if you look closely, you can see them above the large K9 teeth in the above pic. So I cut away the shell to expose the holes and re-pored the gums, of course after several layers of PVA. It worked ok... But some of the new layer flaked off... it was almost like the acrylic didn't want to stick to itself. So... Super Glue to the rescue. I then sanded over the glue to make the gums smooth. Patch Job. Not ideal but it wasn't to obvious, so I decided to roll with it.
Painting! The best bit. I couldn't afford the acrylic paints, so I opted for my trusty illustrator palettes. Alcohol paints were interesting on acrylic. But I had fun.
I painted the upper teeth first. If you notice, there is a difference in clear gum line between the upper and lower sets. This is because I had some issues with the paint pooling and drying from the outside in... this meant that I had this weird paint pooling thing happening in the gum line of the upper teeth. I tried to alcohol/metho it off... but it gripped and I had to Dremel off the paint. So... the upper gumline doesn't look clean because I'm not that great with a Dremel.
As I didn't buy the acrylic paints, I didn't have the beautiful clear gloss. But I did have clear acrylic. So being the rookie that I am, I thought I could simply poor the clear acrylic into my mould and I would set the alcohol paints in place and I would have a nice thin layer of clear shiny acrylic. Hmmm.... not the case.
So, I seemed to have 2 things going on here that are less than ideal.
1) The acrylic doesn't want to stick to itself. I had a similar result when I tried to run a secondary layer over the holes in my first run of pink gums on the lower set. I used super glue to secure the second layer then, but in this case, I'd be gluing for a while. 2) The paint I lovingly applied has melted into one big mush.
My options at this point are to re-do the teeth or to use my Dremel to remove the layer and effectively re-sculpt my teeth with the fine engraving tips available.
Due to time, I chose to Dremel. Although, If I had even an extra day, I would have redone the teeth. I wasn't happy about loosing all the detail I had in my original sculpt and I knew I wasn't that great with a Dremel tool to begin with, so not an ideal situation. But at times like this, all I could do was to do my best and see how it goes.
This time... I just used clear nail polish to set the paints and to give it that wet look... not great for long-term wearing of course, but for this purpose, it would be ok.
The fitting went ok. The vacuum formed piece wasn't as snug at the back as I would have liked in the first place, but that was as good as I was going to get from my machine. There was no 'snap' in place feeling when I tried them over the plaster casts. But there was no uncomfortable areas for my hubby. So that's a plus. The teeth had trouble staying put, so I didn't have time to get denture adhesive so a little bit of chewing gum did the trick.
Comments
So onward to my second poor of the white/yellow tinted acrylic.
As you can see below, no more bubble in my PETG!
1) The acrylic doesn't want to stick to itself. I had a similar result when I tried to run a secondary layer over the holes in my first run of pink gums on the lower set. I used super glue to secure the second layer then, but in this case, I'd be gluing for a while.
2) The paint I lovingly applied has melted into one big mush.
My options at this point are to re-do the teeth or to use my Dremel to remove the layer and effectively re-sculpt my teeth with the fine engraving tips available.
Due to time, I chose to Dremel. Although, If I had even an extra day, I would have redone the teeth. I wasn't happy about loosing all the detail I had in my original sculpt and I knew I wasn't that great with a Dremel tool to begin with, so not an ideal situation. But at times like this, all I could do was to do my best and see how it goes.