Color visual art creation on metals via multifunctional laser paintbrush

Abstract

As laser technology has gradually been integrated into our life, it serves as a promising tool for artistic creation. By means of advanced science and technology in this field, we expect to improve the design of traditional arts and crafts to an innovative level. In this paper, we presented a multifunctional laser paintbrush for creating traditional artistic pictures on metallic surface. We demonstrated that our laser paintbrush has three basic functions: coloring, erasing and rewriting. Firstly, the process of laser-induced coloration on titanium surface were investigated experimentally and theoretically. Then, the influences of laser parameters on laser-induced coloration were quantitatively evaluated and this color durability in terms of time, chemical and environmental resistance was examined. Moreover, we proposed using ultrafast pulsed laser to selectively erase the colored areas in ethanol and nitrogen atmosphere. We found that our laser paintbrush had high erasing quality on the colored surface. Rewriting in the erased fields can increase the saturation and lightness of colors. Finally, with this multifunctional laser paintbrush, we successfully created traditional artistic pictures with different colors on metals with this multifunctional laser paintbrush.