Style And Create Light Desk
Dorthea Seate
I featured a bunch of DIY desk project ideas a few weeks ago, and one of my favorite looks is similar, using cabinet bases and a dark wood top, but I wanted a white glossy desktop with a smooth surface so I used resin to create it.
These were my basic supplies, this Countertop Epoxy, two buckets, my culinary butane torch, latex gloves, paint stir sticks, 16 oz. acrylic paint in white and 2 oz. metallic gold, small wood stir sticks, a sponge brush, and lots of plastic tarping!
There is a technique I used for creating the stripes, I mixed a tablespoon of acrylic paint with a few ounces of resin and used a wood stir stick to drip it over the white resin base when it was still wet. This is an example of creating the marbleized look which I did on the first pour with taupe acrylic paint mixed with clear resin.
The resin will drip over the sides and you have to keep coming back every 5 minutes over the course of an hour to smooth the drips. You also need to keep a little bit of resin reserved for the edges because as it drips off it will expose the wood edge so just like frosting the sides of a cake, you need to keep applying resin to the sides every 10 minutes for about an hour until it starts to solidify and stay in place.
The butane torch is necessary to get out any of the tiny bubbles that will come to the surface. You can see even the more marbleized design I created with the taupe colored resin on my first pour in this photo.
Yes I think it would. The epoxy resin I used is designed for countertops and tabletops. Look on the website for the amount you need per square foot and consider buying a little bit extra, better to have more than you need. Especially true for the edges of the table since the resin drips and you need to keep coming back and applying resin to the sides as it solidifies over the first hour or two.
I had to reread the paragraph about screwing the two pieces together. Technically you could have just used the one piece of plywood, yes? The top would have been half the thickness so it was a good way to use up the rest of the wood while getting a heftier desktop.
This is so fabulous! The CAT!!! Oh my goodness! But, I like the abstract lines better so maybe it was all for the best? ? Will you report back how this wears? Id live to know how it holds up to heavy uses and kids sliding books all over it. We homeschool and we have torn up so many table tops. I think this could be a great treatment for an ikea tulip-style table.
How durable is the epoxy in real life? Will it withstand drippy glasses left on it, and ballpoint pens writing on thin paper? Does it fade in the sunlight? How do you clean it? Would love a re-visit after the desktop has been in use for several months.It sure looks lovely in your photos!
Everytime I point a digital camera of some sort (webcam, phone, camcorder...) at my LED desk lamp or its light reflected off an object (only if the object is very reflective and/or near the lamp), I see some scrolling black lines that shift thickness and scrolling speed as I change white balance.
They make it impossible for me to film uboxing and other videos using my desk lamp as light source. What is the cause of this? I also noticed my ceiling-mounted LED light produces a similar pattern as well albeit with thicker lines. Finally, my bedside lamp - also LED - creates no such phenomenon.
Cheap (to make) LED lights will flicker at twice the mains frequency. There are many ways of overcoming this in the design of lights, such as using a larger smoothing capacitor (which makes the light bulky), using a dedicated progressive LED driver IC (which turns off some of the LEDs but not all of them, so the light dims rather than going out every half cycle) or using a switched mode converter at a higher frequency (which is more complex than the more common capacitive dropper, but allows dimming - adjustable LED panels sold for use in photography will have this technology).
The reason is very simple. LED's are not constantly turned on, but flicker at a very high rate, usually due to fluctuations in your powerline. Your video camera records at a fixed framerate and as such, you can see these black lines.
One way to counteract this is by not using an LED light source. But you may be able to work around this by setting a slower shutter speed (thanks to ths in the comments for this suggestion). You will likely need a tripod then though.
Personally of the three possible causes I think you are dealing with number 3. The reason I think this is that the lines are very hard edged. With mains-derived flicker I would expect to see a gradual ramp up and down. With switchmode converter derived flicker I would expect to see a sharp transition from black to full brightness followed by a gradual fade out.
As @LPChip said, LEDs flicker at a high rate. This rate is equal to twice the frequency of your powerline (afaik, 50Hz in Europe, 60Hz in USA). If your exposure time is a few times the flicker rate, you'll have no trouble. Also possible is a exposure time of exactly a low multiple of the flicker frequency (so if your power is using 60 Hz, you can safely use 1/120 s or 1/60 s). For video, I'm not sure how to deal with the flicker, but a frame rate of exactly the power frequency might work. (if you use a framerate even slightly different from the net frequency, you'll catch a different phase of the light cycle at each image, so some frames will get full light, some will catch the full dark period, and the others will be somewhere in between.
One is the driver needed to transform the incoming alternating current into direct current. More expensive circuits can remove the pulsing that remains after the initial transformation of the alternating current.
Another might be related to the composition of the lamp: white leds are actually (blue?) LEDS within a (fluorescent) material that converts part of the LED light to longer wavelengths (green, yellow, and red light). If that material shows some phosphorescence, the lamp will continue emitting light for a short time (ms or s) after the LED "switches off". That can diminish the flickering.
Yes, this is a shutter speed issue. Or rather it's your camera getting (almost) in sync with the flicker of your lamp. LED and fluorescent lamps (either CFLs or the longer tubes) only produce light for instants within any given second. Good old-fashioned incandescent bulbs also flicker, but the thermal inertia in the wire means that the degree of flicker will be much reduced and will barely be noticeable in many photos.
The solution is easy - either change the bulb in your desk lamp, or choose a smaller aperture & longer exposure for your shots. Do experiment, but something like 1/30th or 1/15th second exposure should mean that the illumination flicker is eliminated. If you need to be hand-held, then consider a high-frequency bulb. That would then allow you to have a shorter exposure time.
Pulse width modulation. A common way to vary the brightness of LED lights is to turn them on and off rapidly. The duty cycle, or the percentage of time when the light is on, determines the brightness. I assume that when you say you're changing the "white balance," you mean that you're actually adjusting the lamp and not the camera. Decreasing the brightness of the lamp will result in wider black bars because the lamp spends more time off.
Another difference may be in the way your bedside lamp is powered compared to your desk and ceiling lights. High-power LEDs are typically powered with a constant current driver, which prevents too much current from flowing through the LED modules and causing them to overheat. Lower-power LEDs, like those found in strip lights or lamps that use dozens of small LEDs instead of a few large ones, can be powered with constant voltage drivers instead. In this case, a current-limiting resistor or just the combined internal resistance of a number of LEDs powered in series can limit the amount of current that flows and keep the LEDs from overheating. So, your bedside lamp might use a constant voltage driver (or even just a battery) that doesn't work by turning the light off part of the time.
I have a really good bright light source (an angle poise style desk lamp with a bright daylight bulb). I do prefer natural light so as often as I can I open the window and the curtains right up to let the natural light in.
Hello Cindy,
Thank you for the helpful information. I work as a photographer but all your comments are very useful to me. I like organization.
I would like to ask you where can I find a small table easel like yours?
Thank you.
Thank you so very much for writing and sharing! While I am a creative person and an organized one (albeit organized chaos at times), I am not knowledgeable about drawing. One of the four things my nine year old requested for Christmas was a drawing table. I just finished putting together her
basic drafting table last week and was trying to decide what else to purchase to help her advance her skills a little more when I saw your article. Thank you again for your thoughtful and specific information!
Modernist in style, this desk lamp evolved from the FarnhamFloor Lamp and is defined by its clean lines and cylinder base. Thearm, with visible joint, can be angled in varying positions,allowing greater flexibility.
Thanks to Family Rated Club, I received Influencer Style and Create Light Desk, We Wear Cute Activity Kit, complimentary, in exchange for my honest review. This activity kit was SO much fun! Perfect for for any age to create and design pretty much any look you may "feel" that day. Fun by your self, and even more fun with a friend!
My two girls really enjoyed playing with this. They had a blast coming up with different outfit ideas for their characters and were really in aw of how shiny and holographic they were. They had no issues with cutting out the pieces they did say it was a little difficult peel off the plastic covering but wasn't a big deal. They were able to easily stick and peel the holographic covering.
c80f0f1006