Hello guys,
I'm currently in the process of dyeing my own keycaps so may be I can answer some of your questions.
First little backstory, I designed a 60% keyboard, inspired from some leaf variegation from my plants naively thinking that I would be able to find custom coloured keycaps.
Sadly, after some googling I realised it was a sweet dream and my best option was probably iDye Poly. I got most of my inspiration from this thread :
https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=35444.0 and went to ask for advice directly on jacquard's forums :
https://www.jacquardproducts.com/forum?p=post%2Fadvice-to-create-some-color-11666616%3Ftrail%3D15So :
1. As I'll need to be able to see the legends, if keycap legends were translucent, would I still see them if i dyed a white keycap to dark brown/black?
The general rule of dyeing is that you can only dye something to a darker colour. So if you dye the all cap and the cap has different colours / materials it will affect them differently but it's hard to anticipate the result without trying.
2. Would it be better to just have the legends on the stock keycaps printed?
It depends on the result you are looking for. Respecting the rule "you can only dye something to a darker colour than it was" if you have white keycaps with dark legend you can dye it to a darker colour and still see the legend. If you have dark keycaps and lighter colour legends, you can dye the lighter colour to a darker one.
3. Are there any kinds of solutions or ways to add the legends back? Presumably these are light coloured legends on darkly dyed keycaps. Been struggling with this thought, as I'm not sure if cutting out and pasting alphabets with sticker paper pre-dyeing would work, since it may look amateurish (with my horrible hands), or maybe it could boil up in the water.To my knowledge, it's the only solution but it seems so hard to achieve a nice render. Luckily I'm not using any legend so it makes things easier.
My current experiment :
I'm trying to get a darker green, that's why you can see some fails on both ends getting something way to dark.
My conclusion, in all honesty, I think getting the colour you are looking for by dying them is as much as an utopia as trying to find the right colour on the internet unless you just find the perfect colour from iDye poly or Dylon in the first place. Mixing the colours is a mess and require a lot of dye and retry changing ratio, concentration, temperature and time of cooking. I would by curious to see the result of pro 5-sided dye sublimation, I'm willing to try it if anyone can send me the link to this type of service.