When we first started in May 2019, we never knew that it would take us almost 1.5 years to get familiar with the whole process and announce our very first artisan keycap (Cyborg 11/2020). It was a long journey, where we have learned, experimented, and failed so many times, which had brought us where we are today. However, it is the passion that keep us going, practicing and honing our techniques everyday.
Keycap customization can be as simple as a single fill with a different color from your keyset, or a mixture of different colors poured into a mold to make it interesting. From there, we can separate the shots with different colors and iteration to create something unique. Something that requires more shots, which bring different colors, details and effects into it and called it an artisan. This is where multi-shot comes into play.
The complexity of the keycaps, is totally depend on the artisan makers’ imagination and creativity. One can insert as many shots as they wish, however, there are multiple factors that need to consider, such as: curing time, color bleeding/blending, air-trap, color consistency…
In the early days learning the casting process, it takes us 6-8 hours just to wait for the resin to cure completely before we can place another shot.
Let us walk you through our crafting process, from our inspirational source to deisigning the sculpt until we get a final print.
Inspiration
To begin with, we actually have no artistic background. Pizzza works in the office daily from 8-5, and he used to draw random things since high school. His passion for artisan keycap came when his older brother gave him a mechanical keyboard as a gift that helped him a lot with the paperwork. After exploring the mechmarket community, Pizzza fell in love with the artisans and that’s when he started sculpting.
In his early days of sculpting artisan keycaps, @pizzza013 started with familiar faces like Thanos, Majin Buu, Pokemon… going from the simplest model and gradually increased the details of the sculpts. He also found his role model – Simon Lee, IG: spiderzero. After sometime observing and inspired by Simon, Pizzza started to make his own style, something unique and different from the rest of the market at that time – more detailed.
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”
Steve Jobs
- Our childhood filled with Japanese manga, cartoons… which has reflected heavily in our sculpts during 2021 and the first half of 2022. As you can see in the design of the Feudal Japan Warriors – Butora, Master Rua, Geineko, , or Feudal Monsters – Tanuki, Oni-Chan, Kitsune – and other characters: ShinoPi, Grand Master Rua, Debuto…
- Not only inspired by the Japanese fantasy, Pizzza also found his muse from the characters around him. First of all, is his bull dog – Don Pizzza – 1 of our best sellers! Don Pizzza has appeared many times during 2021, with some unique designs such as: Mumpi, Vampi – especially for Haloween event.
- Secondly, in the middle of 2022, we have successfully brought a childhood character related to Mid-Autumn festival into life, codename: Aruna!
- While working on existing projects, Pizzza also try to explore other themes in his free time. He has produced an Odin digital sculpt with the Viking theme and 2 other sculpts inspired by the Aztec Gods. However, we couldn’t bring him into production due to the limitation of our 3D printer at that time. Later on, in Q2 2022, we decided to upgrade our printer and successfully bringing the Keyborgs (Viking) and Tribal (Aztec) to the world.
The Sculpting Process
Traditionally, artisan keycaps are made from clay, and then transformed into a mold to start the casting process. Nowadays, there are applications to create digital sculptures, all you need are a tablet and a pen to sculpt anywhere.
Even though we have fully moved to digital sculpting, we will never forget how fun and challenging it is to work with clay.
Clay
To get started, the first thing we searched for, is the types of clay. To make an artisan keycap, you need the type of clay that is relatively hard, because it is difficult to create those tiny details in the sculpt. We read a lot about Monster Clay, however, there was nowhere to get it in Vietnam at that time. So we turned to find some local suppliers and we found Kato – Polymer clay.
What we didn’t know at that time was: Kato clay is extremely hard to work with. Even after we conditioned it, still very difficult to handle. With clay that has been in the storage for a long time, we tried to apply mineral oil but it’s very messy.
Find the clay with medium level of hardness so that tiny details like horns, or thorns, can maintain its shape until you finish the sculpt, and not too hard to limit your creativity.
After sometime using Polymer clay, we decided to try oil-based clay that Simon Lee was using at that time. And we found NSP Chavant which has similar quality as Monster Clay. After using both NSP and Monster Clay, we found that NSP is stickier when interacting with the equipment.
At one point, we found a supplier importing Monster Clay into Vietnam, and the rest is history. Until one day… we saw @slimescholar posting a photo of his sculpts in Discord. It was not clay, there was no table, no equipment next to it, it was a 3D model.
Going Digital
Curious, we reached out to Slimescholar, and found that he was using Forger and so we went to explore sculpting application for mobile. At the same time, Nomad just came out while we’re checking out Forger, after consideration, we decided to choose Nomad.
As clay-sculpting requires many equipment and also time consuming, we couldn’t bring everything with us while working a 9-6 job. The more we learned about Nomad, the more we save in terms of time and effort to create new designs. After awhile, we upgraded from mobile phone to the ipad Pro 2018 and bought an online course to learn Nomad interface. From then on, we completely moved to digital sculpting. Aside from Nomad, we also tried Blender and Zbrush, here are our humble opinion:
- Nomad: highly recommended if you only do sculpting
- Blender: quite good, it has more complicated tools/ functions than Nomad
- Zbrush: industrial standard, use Zbrush if you’re serious. As we are doing this part-time, it’s unnecessary to purchase the app.
Digital sculpting has provided us a great advantage, as part-time artisan makers, we now can work on the design anywhere, anytime!
Of course, you know that Pizzza loveeees the details, if there is no restrain of the technical, our sculpt would be way more complex. Digital sculpting requires a 3D printer which decides how detailed your sculpt can be. We started with a 2K model, and then upgraded to 4K, now is 8K. Using lower resolution printers has limited our sculpting capacity.
With each model of the printer, we really grateful that our casters have been working hard and practicing their technique. Every shot they do is so precise and steady, without them, we would never be able to contribute our artisans to the community.
Next step: Colors and Effect
You might have a intrigued and complex design, however, there is no use if you cannot fill in the colors and give it a soul. Color combination – or Colorway – and effect are the most important elements that make a keycap becomes an artisan. We are going to share with you the PCraft Casting Process in another blog spot. Stay tuned!
Thank you for reading <3
P.Craft,