Faux Neon Sign

A while ago, I saw this art and thought it would look great re-imagined as a neon sign. As interesting as glass blowing would be, the facilities and time to do this is a bit out of reach at the moment. I learned that it's now possible to buy LED stripping that's wrapped in diffuser tubing of a high enough quality that you don't see the individual LED elements, and it mimics the effects of a glass tube of neon. I bought some of these strips and began converting the art to an equivalent design more fitted to this medium. I traced it into the neon sign template you see here:

After getting the art onto paper and taped behind a sheet of polycarbonate, I started cutting sections of faux neon led strips and gluing them to the sheet. This was the first test to make sure the segments where properly connected

More progress on the led stripping! The best method I found was to cut on the black indicator line on the back of the led strips for a really good solder point, then cut the other end wherever need be

The teeth alone took ~5 hours in total, where 3 of those were cutting notches out of the diffuser tubing that the led strip is inside of. You need to cut notches to allow the strip to bend sharply, without accidentally cutting into the led strip itself

After several more hours of working, I got all stripping fully glued down:

The final step was to solder all the loose wiring into a single output harness. I tried to do it in such a way that the harness would bend around behind the led strips as much as possible, making them unnoticeable.

This is the finished art, all lit up!

Later after this I decided to cut the polycarbonate to a 1 inch border around the LED, which definitely improved the aesthetics. I've considered selectively painting the back of the polycarbonate black to pull/push the light in ways that emphasize the design more, but have yet to do that. I'll update this page in the future if I ever decide to do that.