We've been getting into creation of mirrors lately. Well, not actually creation, but enhancement. Mirror upgrades, if you will. There are several methods of decorating a mirror with a laser, and I've been playing with each method to see what's possible.

First is a simple etching of the glass on the front of the mirror. Now this can be done with a vinyl mask and sandblasting, but the sandblasting is quite uniform, and essentially a binary process. That is, the image is either clear or opaque - there are no shades of gray. If you etch the surface with a laser, though, you can get fine details that the mask-and-blast process can't possibly match (the laser beam is 4/1000ths of an inch across!), and you can get 256 levels of gray by dithering the pixels (like they do in newspaper images - the dots are all the same size, just spaced out differently to get different shades of gray. )

The second method is to etch the image or text right through the paint and silvering on the back of the mirror, so that the mirror is not reflective there anymore. If the mirror is then back-lit, the image jumps right out at you like some kind of fiery biblical apparition! This is also quite effective if we back-paint the image with a translucent colored varnish or dye. It is still fiery, but colorful to boot.

Finally, the image can be etched into the back of the mirror as above, but then the etched parts are back-painted with black or other opaque colors, which can be quite effective in its own right.

Stay tuned for some images of the latest crop of mirrors and glass pieces - we're on a roll!

-Steve