Resin I’m familiar with since I worked with it last year in Love and Necessity. However, there were a lot of things I still hadn’t learned. I had colored the resin by coating it with colored varnishes instead of dying the resin itself. So, firstly, I wanted to tackle the task of how to color the resin.

£29-ish

properties of East Coast resin:

doesn’t entirely cure, could leave a finger print if enough pressure applied

takes 24 hours to cure (at least in the temperatures I’m working in).

colorless/clear and viscous

expensive.

I set out to find what would color the resin and what effects would form, I used:

vitrial_glasspaint

alcohol ink

oil paint

acrylice paint.

I also used varying concentrations of each colorant:

These are the results:

Vitrial and alcohol ink had an even distribution of color. Whereas oil paint had little flakes of color and acrylic paint seemed to clot in the resin and form an uneven effect.

Alcohol ink remained the most translucent even with the 3rd and heaviest concentration. Vitrial and oil-paint were also pretty translucent until the 3rd concentration.

Acrylic paint left a pretty opaque effect.

[It may be helpful the read this post in conjunction with my post on making molds and my post on my ideas for first term. ]

I wanted to create a faux amber effect and used vitrial:

When doing the leaf, I tilted the mold to get the layer of colors to bleed into one another at several points when it was curing. I think it was fairly successful effect. However, I hadn’t added enough and the whole leaf didn’t get cast.

I used vitrial again for the dinosaur, but also liked the flaky effects of oil paint and added a little bit to the mixture. However, all the specs suck straight to the bottom and were too dark to the burnt ochre color to look effective.

Since I was looking at placing objects/papers with significance in resin, I needed to test how certain colors would show up, if ink would smudge etc:

I soon ran out of resin and wanted to try a resin that’s reviews included fully cured. This resin is also the semi-sphere on the bottom row and very left of the above picture, I casted that one later.

£20-ish

properties:

pretty similar to the above, but actually fully cures.

A few objects made using said resin:

The above was cast into an alginate mold and gave the resin a strange texture. I re-molded the object in silicone and recast below:

I cast into a few molds, playing around with the different shades to obtain an amber-like color.

I later did a few more crayons to experiment with gradients. As the crayons were being cast length-wise I didn’t know what to expect, how much layers would sink into one another. The one on the left had too great a difference in color and not enough shades in-between the two. The second has a smoother gradient, which is more effective.

I also cast into halves of my dinosaur molds.

Unfortunately there was a hole in one half and this is all I obtained. I layered different shades of resin, but did not stir them together.

I need to be more vigilant about checking my molds, so that I don’t waste resin with it seeping out of molds.

I managed to clean up some of my casts, just using a craft knife. The crayons, and some other casts aren’t so easy to clean up:

I need to further experiment with resin, by learning how to sand and polish resin.