Experimentation: Glass and Hairspray
My problem with the glasses is that the ink doesn't dry on them, initially I thought spraying fixative might set it. Since fixative is very expensive I settled for a cheaper option: hairspray. In my head it was perfect and it would work with no problems but unfortunately the hairspray makes the UV ink go into spots and bumps whilst adding a kind of sticky surface onto the glass. The spray also makes the glass misty which kind of ruins the affect of the ultraviolet light and makes the light across the glass green instead of blue as it was without the spray which is interesting. Another problem is that when the light doesn't shine on the glass you can still see the writing - which defeats the point of using ultraviolet light.
Even though it did work, to an extent, I probably won't use this in my outcome. After putting a post on my Instagram story asking if anyone had any advice and I got two responses. One from a designer who works at a printers who suggested a spray-able glue that may set it and failing that, he suggested printing UV ink onto some vinyl self-adhesive to wrap the glasses in. I'm not sure how either would work, but I'm willing to try it. Another suggestion from a different artist was sanding the glass or using frosted glass as the ink may stick better to a textured surface. I'm not sure how sanding glass would work or how the light would travel through frosted but again, I'll try it because I really want this to work.
