Author Topic: Any of you do hand-painted keycap customization?  (Read 4949 times)

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Offline Lunatique

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Any of you do hand-painted keycap customization?
« on: Sun, 07 December 2014, 18:03:53 »
Have any of you artistic types tried to do hand-painted keycap customization? For example, using acrylic paint, enamel paint, nail polish, oil-based waterproof markers, etc to highlight specific keycaps by painting a border rim around the top face, or make the legend bolder/different color, etc. You can even get really creative and paint images onto the keyboard's frame or on the keycaps. A protective coating could seal the paint and make it more permanent, and if it eventually wears off, you could just touch it up.

I've been painting my keyboards for a few years now, and I started doing it because I wanted to make certain keys more obvious, and I didn't know anything about the keyboard community and all the customization options, so I just tried to DIY according to my needs. Now that I know there are custom keycaps I can buy, I'm a lot less inclined to do hand-painted customization, since it's so time-consuming and it's difficult to make it look perfect. But for rare cases where the commercial options are not ideal or too expensive, I might still do it from time to time to make certain keys more obvious in dim light or just quicker to find when doing critical work.

Offline fohat.digs

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Re: Any of you do hand-painted keycap customization?
« Reply #1 on: Sun, 07 December 2014, 19:15:48 »
Mandolin has done some great work.

https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=65333.0
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Mr. Obama came to an agreement that did not involve America’s most precious treasure, the lives and limbs of our soldiers.  The 1.7 billion dollars of frozen Iranian assets released by Obama pales in comparison to the 300 billion being floated as a rebuilding fund.
So far, speculation that Iran will be free in the future to continue its nuclear program is the opposite of Trump’s stated goal for the war and in direct opposition to what Mr. Obama negotiated.
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Offline lowpoly

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Re: Any of you do hand-painted keycap customization?
« Reply #2 on: Mon, 08 December 2014, 06:11:42 »
Hi Lunatique. Must have been 10 years or so.   ;D

Miniguru thread at GH // The Apple M0110 Today

Offline Lunatique

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Re: Any of you do hand-painted keycap customization?
« Reply #3 on: Mon, 08 December 2014, 15:38:23 »
Mandolin has done some great work.

https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=65333.0

That's a whole other level of DIY.  :eek:

What I did was much more modest--just simple highlighting of specific keycaps like this:

83651-0

Hi Lunatique. Must have been 10 years or so.   ;D

Hahaha, I always seem to run into "ghosts of the CG past" in other geek-related forums. I run into members from sijun and cgtalk on music/audio forums, photography forums, and now keyboard forum.

Offline dorkvader

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Re: Any of you do hand-painted keycap customization?
« Reply #4 on: Mon, 08 December 2014, 23:33:47 »
There were a lot of hand painted and nail polish painted keycaps a while ago on GH.

NIQmods did some automotive painted ones. I have some nail polished ones, but I don't know who did them. I can take pictures if you like.

Offline Lunatique

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Re: Any of you do hand-painted keycap customization?
« Reply #5 on: Tue, 09 December 2014, 00:13:38 »
There were a lot of hand painted and nail polish painted keycaps a while ago on GH.

NIQmods did some automotive painted ones. I have some nail polished ones, but I don't know who did them. I can take pictures if you like.

Yes, I'd love to see some photos. Thanks!