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Back in February I made this suncatcher as one birthday presend for my good friend empyrean-dreamer.
It shows Empyrea, her dragon OC and character in our pen and paper rpg.
It will probably remain the last large scale project undertaken with the meltable plastic granulate "Colouraplast".
While the stuff is well suited for patterns or smaller suncatchers, there are major drawbacks when it comes to large scale projects. Most importantly the black liner used for this image (contrary to what it is supposed to do) will stick very firmly to any baking paper or metal surfaces. So in order to avoid it getting firmly fixed to the metal platter which I used to put the granulate into the the oven, I had to put a layer of silicone underneath as shown in this making-of image.

But since that silicone grows a lot when heated up I had to keep it smaller than the rim of platter to prevent it from creating waves. In the final image you can see the kind of edge the silicone left along the rim of the finished suncatcher. Also, to fill up gaps and holes in the plastic survace during the melting process on the expanding silicone layer I had to repeatedly grap into the running oven to carefully drop additional pelets in the right color into those holes and gaps. While this worked out and there are no holes in the suncatcher (so that was worth some burned hands) the resulting additional baking time caused parts of the suncatcher to turn slightly brownish (most visible in the sky above Empyrea).
So I reckon in the future I am going to use the stuff only for smaller and less clearly defined projects. It was probably the lack of suitability of coloraplast for more refined projects that made me start glass engraving and glass painting recently ;-)

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Posted previously at: 2018-05-15T22:31:55 | Posted previously by: malte279