Aging lume
Posted: November 9th, 2024, 1:11 am
Ok so as promised, here is a guide to aging lume, all words, no pictures, and from memory because I can’t find my old work notebook.
The problem will be translating quantities, because I used to make aged lume in minimum 100g batches, and even in that quantity, I was adding the color portion in fractions of 1%. The simple technique will produce a lume with identical characteristics to my bulk batches.
First a few basic points about lume, and color.
When light strikes a normal coloured surface, like a wall or a watch dial, a portion of light is absorbed, and a portion is reflected back, lume relies on light energy to gain charge, but when you introduce color to lume, you reduce the amount of light that can find the lume. And you do this in 2 ways.
Firstly Your lume mixture consists of particles of lume suspended in a liquid. Each particle of lume is its own light source. Imagine it’s a candle… a single candle will not illuminate a cave, but a thousand candles will. Introducing colour to your lume is like introducing unlightable candles to you cave, replace a hundred of your cave candles with the unlightable ones and your available light is reduced by 10%.
Secondly, when you introduce coloured particles to your lume, they will block and reflect back a portion of the light that would otherwise be absorbed by the lume.
The trick in making a decent aged lume, is to maximise the light getting to the lume, and maximise the number of luminescent particles, in your mixture. Since as a pigment supplier, I had no control over your mixture, my job was to find a way to give you a pigment that you didn’t feel the need to eff around with, by adding coffee or dirt to!
I found that the best way to do this was with transparent iron oxide pigments. But these are hard to work with and they require heavy grinding to disperse in a liquid, and lume doesn’t like being ground. So… one day, in b&q whilst getting supplies for a joinery project, I had an idea…
If this is interesting, let me know and I will carry on…
The problem will be translating quantities, because I used to make aged lume in minimum 100g batches, and even in that quantity, I was adding the color portion in fractions of 1%. The simple technique will produce a lume with identical characteristics to my bulk batches.
First a few basic points about lume, and color.
When light strikes a normal coloured surface, like a wall or a watch dial, a portion of light is absorbed, and a portion is reflected back, lume relies on light energy to gain charge, but when you introduce color to lume, you reduce the amount of light that can find the lume. And you do this in 2 ways.
Firstly Your lume mixture consists of particles of lume suspended in a liquid. Each particle of lume is its own light source. Imagine it’s a candle… a single candle will not illuminate a cave, but a thousand candles will. Introducing colour to your lume is like introducing unlightable candles to you cave, replace a hundred of your cave candles with the unlightable ones and your available light is reduced by 10%.
Secondly, when you introduce coloured particles to your lume, they will block and reflect back a portion of the light that would otherwise be absorbed by the lume.
The trick in making a decent aged lume, is to maximise the light getting to the lume, and maximise the number of luminescent particles, in your mixture. Since as a pigment supplier, I had no control over your mixture, my job was to find a way to give you a pigment that you didn’t feel the need to eff around with, by adding coffee or dirt to!
I found that the best way to do this was with transparent iron oxide pigments. But these are hard to work with and they require heavy grinding to disperse in a liquid, and lume doesn’t like being ground. So… one day, in b&q whilst getting supplies for a joinery project, I had an idea…
If this is interesting, let me know and I will carry on…
