Blockland Crafts

[Alyx Vance]

I recently got kind of bored with drawing so i've started messing with polymer clay, shrink plastic, epoxy resin, etc.

i decided since i got back into playing Blockland, i would make all kinds of BL stuff. Obviously I have no intentions to sell any of it, but if i can find a way to give some of it out i will.

I'll be honest; because i haven't been doing physical crafts for a long time, i'm not happy with them like the way i'm happy with my drawings. A lot of them look kind of bad but i'm posting them anyway because it's fun.


So far I only made 2 rounds of magnets and some keychain prototypes, but I think they came out really interesting so i decided to share

Here is the first round of shrinky dink magnets. The acrylic coating i use for glazing didn't seem to stick very well and even looked like stuff because it got foggy and cracked. I'll probably use epoxy resin next time around. The coloring also looked stuffty because i only colored on one side of the plastic



The second round came out much cleaner because I made sure to color both sides with a pencil. (Prismacolor pencil with the extra sanded variety yielded the best results because of the soft pencil lead on the rough surface). Although they still came out extremely rough. However, progress.



The wrench and zombie came out amazingly. I was super careful and made sure to put a very thin layer of glaze on it. The B logo probably would've came out better if I was more careful with the glaze.

Another thing is that the magnet strips had really bad adhesive so i had to painstakingly super glue them on. (You can actually see where i got super glue on some of the magnets by being dumb lol) 


Here's all of the magnets I made with shrink plastic so far.



They all seem to have the same issue (the glaze going on too thick and then cracking when it shrinks). The only way I could sort of fix it was doing another layer of glaze and then scraping it with a card. This  worked for the Eye of Cthulhu magnet, but it didn't really turn glossy, it kind of became lumpy and even foggy in some spots. From now I'll probably only use the glaze for clay and paper crafts


The clay crafts are the ones I am extremely happy with, they came out how I wanted. except the noob face is having a stroke XD



The already painted ones are sort of "prototypes" for the keychains I wanted to make, and the unpainted ones are going on my keys when finished.


Supplies I used:

• Crafter's Collection white polymer clay
• Apple barrel acrylic paint
• Liquitex acrylic medium (clear glossy) for the glaze
• Grafix shrink film (both in white and in clear sanded)
• Prismacolor colored pencils
• Astrobrights white cardstock
• "Adhesive" magnet strip
• Krazy Glue

WARNING: Do not put loving acrylic-anything into an oven, it will catch on fire. Only use acrylic on stuff you already baked.

Liquitex is pretty good on clay, it's water resistant and doesn't get too easily forgeted up by the sun or extreme temps, it's not the best though. It was annoying to use with shrinky dinks unless I used a thin layer.

Epoxy resin (UV or time setting) is absolutely the superior gloss. It's just expensive and is bullstuff to work with.

The metal jewelry findings that I use for keychains can be bought at literally any store that sells hardware and/or craft stuff, even dollar stores. The little screw in hooks are often called screw eyes, the long ones without screws are called eye pins. I typically use screw eyes with smaller keychains because they hold better when glued in due to the threading (i believe this is what it's referred to).

However for bigger keychains I will often use the long eye pins.... just make sure you use a really loving strong water bonding adhesive such as krazy or gorilla glue, they will slip out with literally anything else. It can be off-brand, it just needs to be the kind that binds from moisture because that stuff is strong. If you get it on your skin or glue your fingers together, you can remove it with most kinds of oil such as baby oil.

If you're an environmental person or just straight up busted; I believe you can also recycle plastic scrap and use it as shrink plastic. Almost every plastic container will tell you what "type" of plastic it is made of. Some shrink plastic is quite literally the same plastic used in some food containers, just be careful and do your forgetin research... don't gas yourself or burn your goddamn house down like a loving idiot. Also get a fan when working with any craft that needs to be baked or cured, it's probably toxic.

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[Alyx Vance]

One other experiment I tried was taking the white shrink plastic (which is the cheapest kind in most art stores) and trying to glue printed or drawn on cardstock onto it. It didn't give me the results I wanted but I think with enough care, it could yield really good results.

It was also extremely hard getting the sizing right.

I kind of took an outline of the assets I used and made a black outline which I printed out to be quite big, and then I would trace the shape onto the plastic and bake it.

Then I took the same assets and shrunk them by 80% (the plastic shrinks to 20% of its original size). This came out sloppy but surprisingly they were almost the exact size and with enough patience you could probably get them looking great.

If you were drawing onto the cardstock, then you'd just trace the already shrunk plastic and cut it out and then color it. I did this for a set of vampire lips that came out looking like a legit magnet you'd get at 5below or something.



The sides are extremely rough because I plan on sanding the uneven sides down, but haven't yet. The glaze also really muddled the ink, so you'd have to first glue the paper down with some kind of quick drying glue and then put a very thin layer of glaze.

This is what I did for the fox and noob face, and it turned out pretty clean. The MCR ones got soaked because I tried to do something that you'd typically do with modge podge, soaking the paper and then laying it down onto the plastic. I doubt the Spotify code will work so again, I'd glue them down and then use a very thin layer of glaze.

This method is unbelievably pointless if you can afford other plastic, a variety that can be printed on exists, but it's a lot more expensive. Just look for "inkjet" on the shrinky dink's packaging. I used this a lot as a kid, works well but does slightly alter the colors depending on what variety you use.

[Goth77]

cool magnets, would use some on fridge