Hello there.
In a previous article, I mentioned buying a can badge machine and producing badges using my own artwork. Since then, customers have purchased them, and they’ve been well received—things are going very well!
This article is about surviving the Reiwa era through desktop manufacturing, aiming for even greater heights.
As the title suggests, I wanted to incorporate gold into my can badges using special printing techniques.
Initially, my plan was to print the design with an inkjet printer, then print the gold areas with a monochrome laser printer, and finally use a hot stamping paper to transfer the gold foil with an iron. However, the 14,000-yen laser printer I bought last year failed to align the print correctly, whether using the paper tray or manual feed, so I had to abandon that approach.
Then, I came up with the idea of creating a gold-specific printing plate to ensure proper alignment—essentially a Reiwa-era update on traditional Ukiyo-e registration. In traditional multi-color Ukiyo-e woodblock printing, “見当 (kentō)” refers to the carved registration marks that ensure precise alignment of different color layers. By combining this concept with the “R” from Reiwa, I named the system “KENTOR.”
There were no rough sketches or detailed design plans—I had everything mapped out in my head.
For the printing plate, I wrote the characters in Procreate and exported them as a PSD file. Then, I used Illustrator’s image trace function to convert the design into Bézier curves and exported it as an SVG file. Finally, I extruded the design in BambuStudio and 3D-printed it using the A1 mini.
This step went smoothly.
When I looked up how to make stamps with a 3D printer on YouTube, I noticed that many people forget to flip the design horizontally during the first print. Well, as someone who calls myself an Ukiyo-e artist, that’s a mistake I wouldn’t make!
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I chose Kokuyo semi-gloss photo paper (0.14mm thick). After researching, I found that regular copy paper lacks sharpness and thicker paper tends to cause failures. Based on what I found, this seemed to be a good choice.