Dye sub print types - Does it matter?

Ever since I found out how much I could do with Dye Sub in general I have been excited to try it on as many non cotton materials as possible. I have been using vinyl flag mesh to create fursuit eyes which has worked out well enough with a few additions. Overall I still recommend it and decided to test out different print styles to see if I could deposit more ink onto the dye sub paper.

I printed the eyes in 3 different printer settings for the paper: Standard vivid, High quality and Premium Matte. The standard vivid was the most muted but High and Premium printed the best. Premium was the nicest and deposited the most ink but def transferred the color a bit different than the other 2.

My initial test was to do it with the same settings I had done in the past. Heat the heat press to 330F and press it with medium weight for 60 seconds. I did not pre heat the material before pressing the paper onto the vinyl mesh. 

The biggest complaint would be the dark colors are never "that dark" so the colors come out more muted/washed out. The look can work with a lot of things but this is something to keep in mind. I do have a small work around to get a darker pupil that is simple and works.

On the brown eyes I still used the same settings but pre heated the material (pressed it for about 3 seconds) the results came out less than ideal in areas, it was squishing the mesh more and the white areas where showing through a lot more. So pre pressing the material to heat it was not a good idea with this material.

So I started messing around with the the time, dropped it down by 10 seconds and was still getting good results. So keeping it for 60 seconds was not necessary, in a way I was getting better dark colors by reducing the time by 10 seconds.

I bumped it down another 10 seconds and still worked just fine. Keeping them at around the 50 second mark in my opinion created the best results.

Premium was still getting the best results. High was a close second.

If you want a darker pupil the simplest thing to do would be to color over the pupil with either a permanent marker or paint pen. Simple solution for a darker pupil.

You can see how the dark pupil compares to the more muted ones. Overall I would consider the dye sub eyes a success on the vinyl mesh. You get a lot benefits plus you can either keep the more muted color or go with a more bold pupil. They are very simple to do this way and provide great vision and are 100% waterproof.

So I will continue using dye sub eyes for my work, will do a combo of some eyes being more muted and others being more bold. To get bright colors on this type of mesh I would need to do a totally different process which I do not have a machine for at the moment.