My dad started doing powder coating, and while I was home for Christmas I wanted to give it a try so I went out and bought a whole bunch of metal cups. I tried as many techniques as I could while I had the opportunity and still use the cups to this day.

The simplest one is the white cup, it’s just a single color spray and cook.

The next level above that was using tape to mark off areas and then spray and cook.

Then I tried doing some where I sprayed, cooked, and then sprayed again. I tried seeing how I could add extra detail by removing some of the powder before cooking, the green and blue didn’t turn out great, but I used what I learned from that in the fire cup.

I think the fire cup is my favorite by far. I sprayed it white and cooked it, then I sprayed it black and used a crushed up newspaper to create a rough texture, I removed a lot of the black near the top and very little at the bottom to create a bit of a brightness gradient and cooked that on. Then I used some translucent red and yellow doing mostly red at the bottom and mostly yellow at the top, creating a color gradient and cooked that on. Then I loaded it into the rotary adapter on a laser engraver to add one of my favorite quotes from a friend before he ‘total party killed’ the hole group - “I didn’t ask how big the room was, I CAST FIREBALL!”. Then I added a last layer of clear coat to seal the engraving.

The last cup was the hardest technique. First coat and cook the cup. Then add masking to the entire cup, and engrave all the way to the base metal with a rotary laser engraver. Then spray with the contrasting color - for mine I used a glow-in-the-dark white. Then comes the hard part, if you bake it all the way, the base layer will weld onto the mask and will damage it, so the trick is to heat it just enough to get the fill powder to ‘flow’, then pull it from the oven and remove the mask, then finish cooking it. The timing is very important with this technique and different powders can interact differently. For me it turned out perfect and the two layers are completely flush and with a perfect seam. Last I covered it with a clear coat, for this one I used a sparkle clear that has white, red, and blue metallic flakes in the clear coat and make it sparkle beautifully in the light.