New Resin Design: Choose Your Own Color!

These two pens are made from the same blank!

In honor of the 80's juvenile books that I loved so much, Choose Your Own Adventure, I have named this style of resin, "Choose Your Own Color". (CYOC from now on...)

The pens in the photo above are both made from the same blank. Well, the same batch of blanks anyway.

The blank is made from polyester resin by swirling a blue colored resin with clear. This allows ANY color to be added after the fact by reverse-painting the hole drilled for the pen tube.

This photo shows a raw blank, un-machined, against two different backgrounds. Keep in mind that this 3/4" thick blank is FAR thicker than any pen barrel would be!

The difference is immediately visible even at this thickness. But the transparency is made, ahem, "clear" with the following backlit photo:

As you can see, this frees the penmaker up to choose any contrasting color! he (or she) can use white, black, red, even a different shade of blue, to back up the blue swirls in the blank.

Another great benefit is the blue swirls are shown with amazing depth, thanks to the three dimensional effect of having a clear resin alongside the colored swirl. Impossible to photograph, but it's amazing in the hand.

In the photo at the start of this post, I painted the inside of the drilled holes with different colors. The black really brightens the blue swirls, while the white gives it a more pastel look. Also, the cap of the dark pen is far thicker than the lower barrel, showing the difference that thicker barrels can have on the look of the pen. (The dark pen is a modified slim, while the light pen is a "Diva", with a similar thickness to the "Sierra" or "Gatsby".)

I'll be making these available via http://www.mantadesigns.com soon, in many colors.