This is a list of common keycap types, ranked in difficulty. Please don't let the more advanced techniques discourage you in any way, but please remember that they require a lot more experience and equipment. We get a lot of people in the server inspired by caps like petri or encapsulations (which is awesome!), but that's also a reflection of lots of expensive equipment and months of experimentation.

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You'll need the Starting Out and Casting supply lists found here. For best results, use the High Quality Casting equipment too.

Single Shot Sculpt

You'll need the Starting Out and Casting supply lists found here. For best results, use the High Quality Casting equipment too.

Cold Casting

Cold casting is a fun technique that allows you to use real metal in your casts to get an authentic shine, or possibly even a patina if you choose to.

To cold cast, the process is incredibly simple. You'll first want to get some fine metal powder of your chosen metal. Pour a small amount into your mold and close it with the stem mold. Cover the sprue holes and shake, shake, shake. Your goal is to fully coat the mold in the power, then pour the excess back into the bag.

Once the mold is fully coated, you can gently pour your resin and let it cure. For best results, you can add colors to the resin to give different effects on the final look. I find a darker color looks best with real metal powders, but experiment to see what you like.

Once your cast has fully cured, you can use a very high grit sandpaper or micromesh to very gently polish the edges, corners, and details to get that authentic metal sheen. Since the exterior is actual metal, this polish ends up looking great, as if the whole keycap were made of real metal.

At this stage, you can also add a patina or rust to your metal as well. You can find guides for the specific effect that you want online. The only thing to take care of is adding some sort of finishing coat to it to protect any aging effects you add as they can flake off over time as the metal layer is incredibly thin.

Slush casting

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Multi-shot Sculpt

Multi-shotting is the process of stacking single shots of color into the mold to produce a cast with different colors that do not bleed into each other.

To multi-shot, use a fine tipped item to place color within the mold. This can be basically anything, but toothpicks work very well. If you want to spend a little more money, you can use plastic luer-lock syringes with a variety of tips to inject the shot with a little more precision. If taken care of, syringes will last for as many as 10-15 shots before needing to be replaced.

Once the color has been placed, allow the cast to cure, preferably in a pressure pot. After the cast has cured, repeat the previous step as many times as needed to place different colors throughout the mold. Once you have placed all necessary colors, the last color will be the body fill. This will be the color that shows everywhere you do not have a shot already in place. After the final shot is cured, demold your cast.

Multi-shotting allows you to add a lot of detail to your sculpts, and when done correctly can result in very clean casts.

Petri

Petri is more advanced, and takes a lot of experimentation and the full $600-$700 worth of equipment to do properly. There are plenty of YouTube tutorials on how to do the petri effect, but you'll need to experiment with your temperature/location/etc to figure out the best timings.

The short of it is this:

1. Pour clear resin
2. Wait a certain amount of time
3. Drop a few drops of alcohol ink to let it spread
4. Drop 1-2 drops of white colorant
5. Wait a certain amount of time
6. Put the cavity mold on top and put in your pressure pot for curing

People are very protective of their timings, and what works for them may not work for you. The end result looks awesome, but what sounds simple is a lot of work.

Encapsulation

Similar to the Petri effect, encapsulations are made when you put something smaller into something larger. This has the very highest learning curve and requires a pressure pot at a minimum (so that full $600-$700 worth of equipment) and a vacuum chamber for best results.

Some of the things you will have to overcome for your workshop include:

1. Humidity (resin is like a sponge and will get cloudy)
2. Bubbles (they can still collect in areas in the encapsulated part)
3. Unwanted inclusions (maybe a shaving fell in that you didn't notice)
4. Reactions between resin and painted parts (maybe you painted a face, but the paint you picked is still degassing a week later)
5. Reactions between resin and other parts (a leaf contains moisture, so the moisture gets whisked out and clouded your resin/cap)