Dollhouse Miniature Neon Sign (non-working)

 

Watch the video here.

Today we are making a fake neon sign for the dollhouse or a miniature business. I was looking through a very old notebook I have that I wrote all kinds of projects in way back when I was first starting to do minis. This was at least 30 or so years ago. Back then I would go the library and check out any books or magazines they had on miniatures and take them home and read everything cover to cover. Took a lot of notes about projects I thought I might want to try to do someday when I had an idea of how to do them. This project was one of those.

When I read it the other day I was instantly intrigued this seemed too simple to work. But I am happy to report I think this could be a really fun thing to do to create some artwork for a more modern dollhouse room. I will say I would be very careful about where this is displayed since hot glue does have a tendency of melting again if it gets too hot. So keep this one out of direct sunlight. I think it will be fine in a normal room-box just don’t place it right in front of a window where the heat could melt it.

The first step in this project is to decide what your neon sign will look like. I went the easy route and just wrote the word “open” since my brain was not really in creative mode yet. I drew two parallel lines to give me the height of my letters and wrote my word all in pencil. I made my letters very blocky and simple. Then once I was happy with what it looked like I traced just the word with a black marker. This way I would be able to see it to trace over it later. I taped this to my work tile. This is my pattern.

Now I taped a small sheet of parchment paper (the stuff from the kitchen) over the top of the pattern. The tape won’t really hold it but it will help a bit. You need to work on a surface that is both nonstick and translucent so you can see your pattern.

 

Make sure you glue-gun is really heated up. I found with the one I have it needed to preheat for at least 10 or 15 minutes to get the glue to flow nicely on the lines. When I tried it sooner it was very lumpy and looked really bad. You want the glue to be dripping really well from the tip of the glue-gun. One the glue is hot it is just a matter of tracing the lines on the pattern. Keep in mind you might need to do multiple layers of glue to get a good looking line. Just take you time and go slowly. Once you have traced over all the lines on pattern make sure the glue between areas is touching. In my case I needed to make sure all my letters joined together. If there is space between them just add a small dot of glue to act as a “bridge” so that you will have one piece when you are done. Now let this cool and set up but leave you glue-gun plugged in so it stays hot.

Once the glue has hardened check to see if you have spots that are too thin or that you missed and add more glue as needed. You can do this as many times as you feel you need to until the sign looks the way you want it to look. Once you are happy let it cool all the way to room temp and you can unplug the hot glue-gun.

Now you can peel the sign off the parchment and take another look at it. If it needs to have more glue added this is the time. Go ahead and add glue to any spots you feel need it. Allow to cool again.

Once cooled use a small pair of scissors and trim the sign to remove any spots that don’t belong and also those hairy bits that hot glue always leaves.

Once you are completely happy it is time to add the color to the sign. I am using some alcohol markers made by Bic, you could use any brand of alcohol marker for this.

Turn the sign over and carefully fill in the back of the design with the marker. Skip any “bridge” areas you added to hold the sign together. I find it takes about 3 coats of ink to get a really good color. I also found letting the ind sit for a couple of minutes between coats allowed it to stay on better. I think (but I’m not sure) that what is happening is the ink is soaking into the glue.

Once the color is the way you want it you can either mount the sign on a board like I did. Or on the wall of your miniature scene.

I had planned to mount mine on black but I liked how the colors looked against the white better so that was what I went with.

For my board I cut a piece of foam-core slightly bigger than my sign, glued a piece of white paper on the front. Then I framed it with some black card-stock.

 

 

I ended up using tacky glue to attach the sign to the board.

 

Now for the almost disaster I had. I was originally going to use some super glue to attach the sign. And for most of the sign it was fine. But the spots where I put the dots of super glue on the area of the sign that was the green color instantly turned brown. I guess the super glue was reacting with the whatever that color ink was dyed with. The other 3 colors I used were fine just the green reacted. I was able to work very quickly and using a sewing pin I picked off the glue from the sign in those areas and then added more ink over the spots.

 

The sign I did on camera was the third time I traced the letters and I see a great improvement from the first one I did to the last one. With some more practice I think I could get some pretty intricate designs with this method and that could be a lot of fun.

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