Another competition experiment!
I am sure something like this has been done often enough before but this is a new experiment for me. So the plate is oak 220mm in diameter and is fully smoothed but uncoated before painting. The top is flat with a shallow smooth bowl in the centre (and a recessed chucking point beneath designed to be left on). Turning and finishing is conventional.
Then, with the plate mounted in the lathe running quite slowly (about 200rpm), a 5 ml plastic syringe is used to deposit a ring of acrylic paint inside the rim of the bowl. The lathe is then spun up, usually to 500-900 rpm, until the paint ring flows outward to the desired dimension. This typically only takes 10's seconds. The lathe speed is then reduced to 200 rpm and it is left turning for a while to avoid dripping, though this may not really be needed. I left about 2 hours for the paint to be touch dry between layers/coats but again this may be over-cautious. FTR the base (yellow), second (orange) and top (red) coats used 8, 5 and 3 ml of paint respectively, in a single operation for each layer.
The acrylic paint is fairly thick - thick enough not to flow out of the 18 ml pots it comes in when they are inverted, but perhaps less thick than paint from an artists tube.
The original intention was to re-finish the bowl to wood after painting but the clean inner edge of the paint and the overall look led us to leave it as it is.
The wax (or any) finish I am now not sure about - perhaps the piece should have been left unfinished (a pre-wax pic is attached), or perhaps coated with a paint-wettable smooth surface before painting. For the future I think. The acrylic paint (obviously water-based) does raise the grain a bit. And perhaps oak is not an ideal wood for this.
The operation is much less messy than you might imagine - only the yellow layer spins out drops, easily caught on newspaper!
Comments welcome!
