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.