Crafty Musings with Roxanne- Casting with Resin First Try


I make many items with cameos and I use resin to create book cover and photo charms....so the next step was naturally to try casting my own resin cameos.

I previously tried using the silicone molds to create cameos with polymer clay- and while they turned out alright trying to use more than one color is just too hard with the clay. It's very hard to push the clay into the tiny crevices. 




Here are a couple of the clay cameos I did, great detail but they'll be impossible for me to paint. I'm much too shaky to do such small detail work anymore.

With resin you pour it in and push it around with a toothpick to get it into all the little tiny cracks and crevices of the design.

So I decided to go ahead and purchase some resin dye and give it a shot.




I am rather pleased with how the cameos turned out.

I also cast a few other items with non-flexible plastic molds. I'm not sure how I feel about those yet. One turned out great but the other two are very floppy.

I do know I like the flexible silicone molds much better than hard molds. They are more detailed and the resin pops out of the molds very easy. The hard molds, not so much. I had to fight with the designs to get them out.

Here are a few other observations I made after my first experiment with resin casting:

1) When I mixed the two parts of the resin together first then added the dye the resin became hard upon drying. That's a good thing. However the color was not as rich.

2) When I added the color with the two parts of resin and mixed it all at once the color was very rich but the resin did not dry as solid.

3) Another thing I noticed is if I add too much dye the resin stays tacky longer and is very flexible when it dries. It has a rubbery consistency when normally (with no color added) the resin dries into a hard acrylic.

4) Final note on my first casting project- I need to apply more oil spray to the molds before putting pouring in the resin. I lightly sprayed the molds then wiped them down. I should have left more oil behind. I wiped too much away. The resin wanted to fuse with a couple of the molds.




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