Flaws with Resin

Hello Arachnids!

   Today I just want to have a little rant about my medium of choice! I love what I do, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes it can be so damn irritating! This is all in good fun, so let’s get into my flaws with resin.

   Resin can be both a fun medium and a frustrating one. I’ve had a lot of pieces unfortunately ruined by annoying or stupid mistakes. Sometimes they can be easily fixed and sometimes they end up like a piece my wife has named “Happy Baby” and there’s no saving it.

   My workspace is small and crooked which can be the number one factor in my pile of unfortunately ruined pieces. When setting my poured mold aside to cure, I often have to manually try to level the piece out so it’s even. Well, I’m not very good at that so I’ve either come out with a completely crooked piece or have pour over onto the paper underneath. This drives me nuts because it means I have to add an extra day with an extra coat in order to fix the leveling issue. The bigger and flatter the piece, the harder it is for me to fix and that’s what happened to “Happy Baby”, a very ugly uneven bathroom tray that brings me horror and shame every time I look at it.

   Another flaw is having an uneven mixture of resin and hardener, or any kind of moisture, that prevents pieces from curing. When a piece doesn’t cure properly it doesn’t become hard. It stays soft and malleable and in one case, it stays sticky like the resin itself. This doesn’t happen to me as often, but it has a handful of times and there isn’t any way to fix a piece that isn’t curing. It’s important to know what brand of resin you’re working with because their instructions can be vastly different. I’ve used brands that call for 2-1 ratios and currently use a 1-1 ratio, but either one, the biggest rule is to make sure your resin is completely mixed! Scrape the sides, scrape the bottom, mix for at least three minutes! But here’s the catch, be careful with your heat because it can suddenly begin to cure while you’re still mixing it, leaving you with a clumpy unusable mess! That’s only happened to me twice, but it sucked both times and I’ve been careful ever since.

   But the biggest bane of my art existence is HAIR! I’ve said before, my space is small. I also have cats and people who have cats know that cat hair, despite how much cleaning, vacuuming, or dusting you do, never seems to go away-like glitter! If the sun is shinning a particular way, I can see the little bastards, just floating along in the air, waiting to ruin my pieces. When I’m working, I need to remove hair from my molds multiple times before I pour. It wouldn’t be far off to say that most of my work process is cleaning my molds! I have completely finished pieces, only to demold them and find out in proper light that there’s a hair in it! Visible and in the worst spots. I want to scream when this happens.

   I keep my pieces in a separate room that’s always closed when they’re curing, and sometimes when I demold a piece, I don’t notice any flaws. A few days later when I’m looking at it again-HAIR! I’m starting to become convinced there’s a hair conspiracy going on in my house. An evil little cat hair floats along to a fully cured piece being worked on and bores it’s way into the center to ruin me! Obviously, I don’t actually believe this but the thought of an evil conspiracy by my cat’s hair in order to undermine my work makes me feel a little bit better about the whole thing.

   Throughout my time working with resin, I’ve had my fair share of flawed and ruined pieces, but I do my best not to let them go to waste. I try very hard not to add any kind of extra waste and be mindful and conscious of reducing my impact.  Reduce, reuse and recycle! That’s why I keep my flawed pieces. Just because they may be flawed in one context doesn’t mean I can’t use it on or in another working. Using this kind of medium, to me, means being as conscious as possible to not create any unnecessary waste.

   With all that being said, thank you for joining on my journey through resin madness. It really is a privilege to be able to do what I love and comforting to be able to laugh when things go wrong. If anyone has tips, leave them in the comments! I’m always looking for opportunities to improve!

['Happy Baby' now available for 2.4 Billion]