Over the past week I have been working on improving three parts of my project.
The first part was improving the light that shines through the gems as the stand alone flashlight was leaving a big white spot in the middle. I bought a new light source to use as shown in the picture below. This light source did not work as hoped as instead of either staying as one color or at least shining one color at a time, this light shine the three colors in multiple patterns. While this light looked cool underneath the clear gems, it did not do well with the colored ones.
I decided to stay with the flash light as the light source but try to improve the light some how. This lead me to try putting various things in front of the light to defuse it. Through this, I found the effect of putting a bigger gem in front of the light gives one similar to a kaleidoscope without needed the gems to move around much.
The second part was creating a somewhat nice stand for the dish to sit and rotate on. I started by trying to design one that sat at an angle to make the gems move around more when rotating the dish. This caused problems as the dish was not as easy to rotate when at angle and would cause gems to either fall into the wrong section or spill out of the dish entirely. (You can find these gems all over the floor of my room now) Another problem with the stand being at an angle is the amount of light it lets through as it was hard to tell how much it was letting through.
I decided to make the stand with the dish only at a slight angle for multiple reasons. The slight angle allows for some gem movement to work like a kaleidoscope and combining it with the effect described previously gives a kaleidoscope effect to the projection without removing the norther lights style feeling. Having it at a slight angle made it easier to control the amount of light that was getting through the cutout in the stand as the angle did not have to be factored in. It also made building the stand easier as I no longer had to cut metal wires as I was very bad at it. The new stand is made from cardboard which rests on top of foam to secure the flashlight in place.
The last part was creating the gem mixes. I had ordered bigger gems from amazon to mix up the mixes. However, the gems that I was sent were not what was advertised as they had metallic backs on them which makes them unusable for this project. There was not enough time to get new gems so I played around more with what I had. I tried to make mixes to fit different feelings. This required testing the mixes as I often put too much of a clear based color (clear, yellow diamond, light pink, light blue) into the mix, which let too much of the original light source color show.
The final mixes that are used in the main dish as shown below with some (bad) names that I gave them based on how they look in the dish and not how they look projected. Playful Pink is a mixture of half salmon pink, and half dark pink that has the goal of making the viewer feel playful based on the pink colors it displays. Fire is a mixture of yellow diamond, salmon pink, and red. This mixture is meant to make the viewer feel warm and passionate. Meadow is a mixture of yellow diamond, light blue, and green playing on the peaceful feeling of a meadow. The last one is Space which is a mixture of light blue, purple, and dark blue to create a cool environment for the viewer.
