Hi JK friends. How are you doing?
We almost finish shipping all the Artifact series artisan keycaps. Some of you already receive it and some soon will. We believe almost all of you caring about how your own artifact caps are formed, so today, Jelly Key is specially giving you a ticket to go on the artifact keycap making Tour, through several steps of Artifact series keycaps making. Here we go!
Firstly, we may know that keycap making is a small featured branch in the keyboard production industry. Although we have a community to share and exchange all of our products, but it hasn’t been assumed as an official channel that entrepreneurs believe to bring them much value and interest. That’s why artists in the community have to struggle while creating, because there’s no particular store provides particular components and material that suit their each specific design.
And we all know since the dawn of custom keycap craft, artist will first work with their clay and sculpt in order to mold and cast with resin or epoxy or some other kind of plastic. But when it comes to the artifact keycap, our artists and craftsman usually face the material lacking issues. They must look for the relevant materials and components out there that meet the quality of a particular design, or sometimes they evenhave to turn a seemed-irrelative-items become usable ones.
In Artifact keycap series, what cost us most time is to find the thinnest slices of wood in Vietnamese & Japanese market, and slenderizing those from an almost 2.0 mm thickness into 1.8 mm, then gradually to 1.4 and ~0.7mm. That’s our revolution to improve the wood slenderizing method while working and we found that the thinner the wood pieces are, the smoother effects they bring about in final appearances. Especially we had applied this technique in the Forbidden Realms keycap making.
But before we taste the sweet of our fruits, we must taste the bitter of patience first. A smoother effect requires more layers than it did, this means it’ll take our craftsmen much more time and patience from the slenderising step to the tiny pieces sticking step. To compare, for example:
In the past, sticking a keycap with 12 layers of tiny wood pieces equal to 7 minutes to finish, multiply with 300 times (supposed number of keycap).
In the near future: ~24 layers, double times perhaps, and multiply with 300.
We haven’t put other time consuming steps into this, but you can tell the number.
So now you’ve seen the toughness of how artists facing while working with unavailable materials and components, how a constant our artists craftsman are and the best consequences they want to bring about. Hope this tour will help you somehow picture the value of what is called handmade Artifact keycap. And be ready to behold Jelly Key next generation of Artifact keycap series.
Love,
Jelly Key