Neon
About three years ago now I took a one-day course at Neon Workshops Wakefield (thanks Jess), where I took my first steps in making neon artwork. This involved some rudimentary glass bending/joining, charging the gases, attaching the transformer etc.
Life and time being what they are, I’ve not had chance to follow up on this - but I’ve had the bug ever since. It’s one of those endeavours where getting to a decent end result requires solid design work/planning, and of course the physical know-how of making the thing (both of which are skills I’d like to develop further). Ideally I’d like to get to the point where I could make a version of my logo to stick on the wall in the office or something. Time depending…
Plans
To make sure I get exactly what I’m after, I think building this sign in 3D and rendering out a photorealistic impression first would be the best way to go about it. I’ve been learning to use blender recently, working on some artwork for Foden’s Band, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to adapt this to the logo.
First of all, since the segments are made by bending a single glass tube I needed to decide how the parts of the logo would be made up. Practically I thought there were only a couple of options here to allow for a couple of colours if needed.
The tubes will be strategically covered in black paint to reveal only the desired segments of the tube.
Layout #02 looking the best I think. Next I started thinking about different colours - this one’s tricky and I decided to carry forward a few of these designs into blender. Though I’m sticking with blue/orange as the primary colour choice.
I brought the blue/orange colours and all three back designs over into 3D, attaching the segments together to form a single tube (per colour). This process took a touch longer than I thought!
Adding frames and a brick wall we end up with the final impressions.
Also rendered out an animation (with a lot of noise, so apologies) to get a better all round view.
Animation showing all three designs. NB: the multi-coloured sign is missing one return tube in this video only!
Basic 360° revolve animation with preferred back design.
Update: 31st May 2023
Ultimately I decided to sack off real neon and go with an LED solution. Real neons are fragile and can be prone to shattering, can be costly to run, and produce a continuous humming. These days LEDs are bright enough and vibrant enough to do the job just fine, so I had one made by a great little company in the UK, www.myperfectneon.co.uk.
See video below!
