The Planet Mongo is nearly finished. I've added the labels, which was a big deal.
So now with Mongo essentially complete, I can look back and see where things need to be improved. Everything seems to hinge on the quality of the labels, yet the labels turned out differently than I had expected.
I elected to use waterslide decals, which are similar to those temporary tattoos that kids like. You print the decal, wet it, and then the wet decal glues itself to the target surface. The decals that I chose seem to glue themselves right way, not leaving any chance to alter the positioning once stuck. That made the work quite a bit harder.
Plan A was to print the decals in colour with my Canon bubblejet. When I did that, the colours all ran off the decals, despite sealing them with acrylic fixative.
Plan B was to print the decals with my HP laserprinter. This worked, but I can only print the type in black.
Plan C was to hand-paint the lettering, but the globe is small and it was super finicky to transfer the text (I shade the back of the text with chalk and then trace out the lettering so that the chalk is transferred to the surface of the globe). It worked, but it was hard to control the chalk.
So, Plan D was to lighten up some parts of the globe so that the lettering would at least be visible if not readable.
If you look closely at the globe, you can see that the decals are shiny where I was expecting them to be matte. The final step of the globe will be to varnish it. This might be difficult since varnish should dry flat, and that the curvature of the globe will likely make it drip.. However, the varnish should cover the gloss of the decals with more gloss.
Lessons learned for Krypton, my next planet: I won't use dark colours, so that I can use black-lettered text. I'll also use more acrylic medium so that I can make finer lines with the paint. That will also affect gloss, so the final test will be to see how well these globes take to being varnished.
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