Hey friends, it's Kayleigh Bird. Welcome back to my studio. You know, I'm always thrilled to have you. So today I have a tutorial that's actually been requested a few times as I've been doing more and more of my three-dimensional oil paintings and that is how to pour resin and stick around because I'm going to also show you what not to do and I'm going to show you a piece of mine that I destroyed. Oh my gosh, yeah it made me really sad. So let me know if you have any of your own resin horror stories down in the comments. I'd love to hear them. Now this process I don't want to scare you by saying that it's really not a very daunting process but it is mixing chemicals and pouring them onto your precious painting. So you just want to be very very careful. So I'm going to go through with you not only how to pour the resin but how I set up my space and what I do before and after to make sure that the process is very clean, neat, nice, easy and successful. So I hope you guys learn a little something. If you do, please make sure you hit that subscribe button. It really helps grow my channel and it makes sure that you come back over and over and over again. I hope you guys love it. Thanks for being here. Now if you're going to incorporate any objects into your resin, make sure that you glue them down because otherwise they will start swimming when you pour the resin. You're also going to want a level to make sure things wind up nice and even and tweezers in case you get any sort of detritus in your wet resin. A heat gun, make sure to blow out all of the air bubbles and then you'll need a plastic cup and stir stake for stirring up your resin and don't forget a dust cover. The last thing you want is a bunch of stuff to get in your painting when you're done. When picking out your resin, you're going to want to get an artist grade quality that dries crystal clear and will not yellow over time. I'll leave a link below for the brand that I found that works well. And I highly recommend that you varnish your oil painting. I do three thick coats because as I said, this is a chemical process and the resin does heat up. It literally can burn the oil paint if it's not protected well. After giving your painting multiple coats of varnish and making sure they're dry, you're going to need to build a shadow box frame. Check around for links because I do have a video detailing exactly how to make one of these. Once you finish making your frame and it's all dry, then you're going to want to go through over the back and use some wood glue or some other kind of really strong adhesive to seal all the cracks and edges. The last thing you want is for resin to seep through the sides in corner and it will literally glue your painting to whatever is underneath. And as I said, if you're going to incorporate any three-dimensional objects within your resin port, you're going to want to glue and dry them beforehand because they will start swimming with the resin. Now these fake eyelashes in this little bit of lace. I went ahead and used some mod podge to make sure they were stuck in there. Nice and solid. And now's the time to go ahead and bust out that level and make sure that wherever you're going to put your painting is going to be a level surface because otherwise when the resin is poured, it's going to be all wonky. It's not going to be a nice straight level pour. Before stirring a resin, go ahead and get a damp paper towel and wipe down your surface very thoroughly. You don't want any dust or debris because it will show up floating in the resin. Okay, now here comes the scary part. We are going to pour the resin. Now the most important thing that you can do is read the instructions that has come with your resin. This is so important because not all resins are made the same. This one in particular is a 50-50 mix ratio which most of them are but you need to make sure to follow your instructions to a tea. Before starting this process, I went ahead and measured out exactly what 50-50 would be in my cup. Now this is incredibly important when the resin bottle tells you you need half and half. They mean it. Don't sit here and try to eyeball it out because I guarantee you you will get it wrong and you won't know until the very end of the process. Go ahead and take the time to get your cup measure exactly what 50-50 would be and don't forget to leave a little room at the top so that you have room to actually start. Once you have the two components mixed in there, you literally want to scrape the sides and stir as thoroughly as you possibly can for a full two to three minutes. Trust me, this is one of the most important parts of the step because if you don't have everything measured out and perfectly mixed, then you are going to have nothing but disasters for your work. Okay, take a deep breath and let's start pouring. Oh my goodness, there is no turning back now. Now the important thing is is that you pour it very evenly and lightly. I like to go kind of slow. I don't just dump and what this does is it makes sure that you get all the surface area nice and covered. You want to get into every single corner that you can and you want to kind of slowly work it under any three-dimensional objects. Now if you pour very slowly and sort of serpie in there, then it tends to coat and get underneath around and through the objects much better than if you just sort of dump a big glob. Now pretty much as soon as you're done pouring it is time to bust out the heat gun. Now going over your surface with this is going to get rid of just about all of those fine bubbles which you can't really see very well in the video but trust me they are there. You definitely absolutely need a heat gun. Once you have finished and you've thoroughly removed all the bubbles now you need to set it in a safe place and put some sort of dust cover or something on it. I use this piece of masonite with just a little something to weight it down. You really only want to do less than a quarter of an inch for each layer of resin. Now this can seem very time consuming considering you have to let each layer dry for an entire 24 hours but trust me the only time that I have had disaster is when I went too thick you want to have nice thin somewhere between an eighth and a quarter of an inch every time you pour. So as promised let me show you what happens when things go terribly wrong. This was a wonderful painting that I really loved and I poured the resin on but I got greedy. I basically put in almost half an inch of resin thinking oh I just need the one layer this will be fine and pretty much as soon as I shut off the camera all of a sudden this terrifying chemical reaction started happening. Things started bubbling and fizzing straight up there was like smoke and steam coming out of it. Oh my gosh I just saw things starting to curl and the resin all of a sudden started to get really hard without being level. It was so terrifying and so unbelievably horrifying to watch my beautiful painting just get destroyed. You can see it turned all kinds of levels of yellow and oh this is very painful to watch. Basically this happened because I got greedy. I mixed my resin everything was fine because I actually used this resin for another painting that same day and it turned out fine but it was just because I did such a thick layer that it bubbled and fizzed and literally burned the painting. So yeah this was really painful to watch happen. Let me tell you I really really love this painting. I think it's a really cool concept and like I said I'm going to redo it but oh my gosh sit in there watching this destroy itself was like so tough but you know lesson learned I got greedy. Honestly like I poured the resin and looked beautiful everything was fine and I just kept pouring and pouring and being like oh well I really only need one layer in this. I've already got everything set up. I'm just gonna keep going and keep going and I try to do like probably close to almost half an inch of resin which is like you can't do that you just can't. So yeah lesson learned smaller than a quarter inch like I'm really doing them like between an eighth and a quarter inch and even if I'm not putting different things in between each layer I'm letting it completely dry and then doing another one and you can't see the layers at all but if you don't this is what will happen to your painting. So make sure you give yourself a good 24 hours between each resin layer and you should be good to go. Thanks so much for joining me today guys make sure you hit that subscribe button and come on back and see me!