To coast or not to coast?

So I love to work in resin. It is no way the medium for the faint hearted. I have been experimenting and working with resin for over 2 years and I have tried various different products and surfaces to apply this to.

There is so much to learn and so many pitfalls and I have fallen foul of all probably most of them at some point. I will write about those at a later date and would be happy to share my experiences of this very addictive and satisfying medium.

I have always loved working on large scale dynamic art pieces but started to look at using moulds for resin and that is a whole new ball game.

I have been like a kid in a sweetshop and have watched 'You tube videos' and researched everything to do with resin moulds, casting and ways I could expand my portfolio so that I could create mini works of art at affordable prices, and I had hoped this would help me gain some traction to draw people to my website.

After much research I found a food safe and vegan resin that was affordable, lets face it resin is so expensive and can't be wasted, experimenting comes at a cost. Plus I really care about the environment. The good thing is once resin is fully cured it causes no harm to the environment and the purpose for what it is used for is artistic and therefore it will not end up in landfill, well I hope not.

After finding some great coaster moulds I embarked upon my first set of coasters, suprisingly they took as long to create 4 of them as a small work of art as I wanted to create something unique.

Air bubbles were a real problem when adding any sort of glitter as these additional elements cause this to happen and I found that a useful way of learning how to handle that. I also learnt to use less resin per moud than I first thought as invariably I needed to finish each coaster with a final clear coat to give them a polished look and then they would all be uniform.

Each set of coasters took 16 hours to cure so this all has to be taken into consideration when using a studio as they need to be kept dust free and undisturbed, so it did render my work space out of bounds for a while

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My initial feedback is, they are great fun to create, you can try so many different colour schemes which can then be built into larger art pieces and it is a helpful way to experiment with resin and the real bonus is you can sell them as great coasters which are totally designer.

So in conclusion I would definitaly make them again and will look at a Christmas collection but don't expect much profit for these little masterpieces. great fun though.