3d resin painting

I've seen a few resin pieces that people have painted, mainly goldfish, and other aquatic animals into. The realism is mind blowing. It intrigued me enough to try myself. I have never attempted to "paint" before. I do have acrylics but I use them to tint my resin for the swirl effects. Using UV curing resin I figured why not try?

Now I did have the thought to use the technique, once semi-mastered, to paint realistic small animals and make shuttles with the resin. The problem is shaping the blades. This technique is essentially layered resin casting. Since the UV resin I use(Magic-Glos) is sand-able, it occurred to just use a rectangular shape more or less the length of the final shuttle length. I had to leave it long enough to later sculpt the blade out of it, but not too long I waste a lot of resin. Because UV resin can get expensive real fast. A one ounce bottle is now almost $15 USD. This is going to be a costly trial piece.

I suppose I should have taken more photos as I was working the layers, but honestly it didn't occur to me to do that until I began typing out this blog entry. Working time spent on this piece is 90 minutes. Pretty quick compared to regular resin casting. I did add a thicker top coat to the piece because I will be taking quite a bit off to shape the blade. I wanted it to remain thick enough to hold tension.

Since this is a fish, in the middle layer I swished the UV resin to create air bubbles in it. Fishies like bubbles. It was actually a lot harder to do since this resin naturally degases so bubbles are minimized.

Apparently it is good enough to catch my Tenchi's interest. Pretty good for a first try right? Now all that remains is shaping the shuttle.

One step foward...

I'm currently working on making the video tutorial for the resin shuttles. Editing takes up so much time. There's takes and retakes and even more retakes. Did I mention I'm doing this in the spare moments from the Real World Work Life? For something that started as just fun, it is taking a lot of work. The biggest issue I'm having is temperature control. Starting the shuttles is not an issue. The curing time is. My Honey keeps turning the air conditioner down to a temperature that ruins the pieces. No matter how many times I mention it, he keeps forgetting. I've wasted bottles of resin this way. For every one shuttle that pans out, there's six that didn't.

On the failures, I'm thinking of trying to make them into thread bobbins. Or even make them into a tray collage encased in a even larger resin base. Similar to the dragon plate display.

Or if I can find a "tile" mold, I can make several of them and use them like blocks to make other things, like a box or shelf. Some of the shuttles came out pretty but are not stiff enough on their own to hold tension. With a side project like this, I won't have to feel bad about throwing those away.

I found another YouTube tutorial on an alternative way to make molds. Make a small vaccum former than with LDPE plastics, make the molds.
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I just picked up my new shop vac as well as most of the materials needed. The only thing missing is the actual plastic. I found a local distributor but they only sell large sheets for more than I planned on spending. I'm looking into alternatives online right now. I did try out making silicon molds out of silicon and cornstarch, but I found that their lifespan is really short. It was not worth the mess involved making them. Plus they did not work for resin casting, they kept leaving a nasty pasty film that I had to sand layers off to remove. So for now I think I'll stick to my good old standard: Oyumaru.