One of our warehouse guys got married last year and came back from his vacation to Hawaii with a bottle of sand from the beach and brought it to me and said, “Hey it would be cool if you did a casting or something with this sand from my honeymoon.” Oh man if that isn’t some pressure I don’t know what is.
Well last year was a long time ago and in the mean time the bottle of sand kind of got lost in the mess behind my desk, however last week I was cleaning up my office and found it. As it turns out last couple of weeks I have been playing with some resin art and lacing to do ocean beach scenes and finally got some pieces to turn out good enough that I’m willing to give it a go with this special sand.
Before we get to his piece that I’ll show in the next blog post I want to run through the rudiments of the technique.
This generally consists of using 4 different resin colors; clear, dark blue, medium or sky blue, and white (yeah I know you could argue that clear and white aren’t colors…moving on).
I usually mix one larger batch of resin, but if you are worried about time small batches are better. In this case I started with about 300ml (200 resin/100 hardener). I like to mix the resin thoroughly for 2-3 minutes, use a timer, and then let it sit for another 3-5 minutes depending on the temperature.
I then used about a third of that to make the dark blue. This only takes a little bit of pigment, like a little scoop with the last 1/8″ of a tongue stick. I mixed this in well with the resin I had poured into a separate cup for this color. Next I poured it out onto the art board with a wavy pattern that diagonally cut across the board.
Next I mixed up a batch of medium blue by mixing in white and a very little amount of blue into a about 60cc of resin. On this piece I ended up doing 2 batches, which in hindsight may have been more that I wanted.
This batch I poured out along the edge of the dark blue. At this point on most pours I have been doing I would mix or swirl the border between the light blue and the dark blue together to get a mixed look, on this piece I didn’t do it until later, which you’ll see in the video, just because I forgot.
Next I poured a bead of clear resin along the border of the light blue, this will help give some depth to the white lacing and keep it from getting lost under the blues.
After pouring that layer of clear I mixed up 50-60cc of white. This will create the frothy edges of the waves. This gets poured in lines along the edge and in overlapping wavy patterns in the lighter blue to create the look of the edges of waves.
Once the white is poured the fun begins. Using a heat gun sometimes with heat and some times just for the fan use it to blow back the edge of the white towards the blues to create the look of seafoam. This part really is an art, playing with duration and proximity of the heat gun to the white to create the pattern.
The heat from the heat gun will drop the viscosity of the resin and aid in creating a seafoam look. The heat gun can also be used in the area between the lighter blue and darker blue to mix and swirl it more.
For small areas a small butane torch can also be used, however care must be taken to not overdo it with the torch and char the resin. Another way to work small areas or get a more intense effect is to use a straw to blow around specific areas, a blow gun can also be used, just make sure to turn down the pressure so you don’t spray resin everywhere.