Resin Geode Art

1. Welcome: [MUSIC] Hey, I want to welcome you to our Resin Geode class. In this class, I have got an absolute ton of fun thing s to show you using the resin. We're going to start off doing some really beautiful small pieces which I have personally turned into little sun catchers that I'm going to hang in my windows. We're going to do several of those to get used to using the resin, seeing how the resin meshes with each other as you circle in different colors and we're going to start off with the little ones to get you comfortable in working with this medium. Then we're going to move up to some little bit larger pieces and those are pretty exciting, because these turned out so beautiful and I cannot wait to see what you create with these medium pieces, because I'm super excited with how beautiful these turned out, using the resin and adding in some yummy cut stones, or glass, or mirror, depending on what you can find and what you choose to use, so these are super fun. I'm going to hang these two as little sun catchers, because the light, if you're using translucent color, shines through these so beautifully, so I'll really enjoy looking at these in my windows. Then once we've got a good handle on the beginning project, learning our materials, and then the bigger project, learning how to add more layers than just the initial layer, we'll move up to a bigger resin piece, which is really beautiful displayed on a plate stand and you can display it sitting up. In this one, we actually do more than a couple of layers, I think I've got at least three layers of color and then a clear coat on top. We've got some beautiful stone and I'll show you how to possibly draw lines onto your resin if you decide that you want to embellish it even more. This is what we're working our way up to as a larger piece and pieces like this, you could display on a plate rack, or you could make little tables out of them if you have a little table stands, I'll tell you what kind of glue that I'm using so that you'll be able to attach these to perhaps some legs and if your piece is big enough, you could have little side tables, or something out of it, which is pretty cool. Then if you're not wanting to do the free-formed resin pieces, I'll also show you how to do these on a cradle board inspired by the geode. We actually have a couple of bonus projects because one day, I was just so excited pouring resin and I had extra resin leftover that I was like, I'm just going to keep going and since I'm going to make these, I might as well film them, so we have a couple of extra projects on there that I didn't really intend when I initially planned out the workshop, but I was so excited when I was doing them, that I'm really glad I filmed them, because these are definitely a couple of my favorites. All of these inspirations were coming from actual geodes. I do have a couple of geodes that I was showing in class just to show you where my inspiration is coming from and how I layered stuff in and just to have it sitting on my art table, looking at it as I was making different geodes, and so, really fun to look at, some real pieces of geode as part of your inspiration. This class is actually really packed full of some good information on using the resin and adding color to your resin and using stones in the resin, so I've definitely packed it full of some really good stuff and I can't wait to see you in class. [MUSIC] 2. Supplies: [MUSIC] In this video, I'm just going to take you around a little trip of the different supplies that I'll be showing you in class. I also have some really pretty sample pieces of geode that I actually found at the craft store and I thought, "Aren't those pretty." Those would be some really nice inspiration for one or two of the pieces that we're using. I thought they were real pretty colors. This is what a real geode actually looks like. You might definitely take a look at Pinterest or some online sources or if you have any type of stores that sell any type of natural rock resources, you might just take a look at some real geodes for some inspiration for the things that we'll be painting. [NOISE] What I'm going to be doing in this class is making some silicone molds because the resin separates from the silicone, super easy. It has been by far, when I wanted to create a geode shape or something, one of the easiest ways to get the silicone out of the mold because we'll be creating some molds, but I did happen to find on [NOISE] Amazon the other day. We'll be practicing with some pre-made silicone molds because this is perfect for small projects like coasters. This is just a set that I found on Amazon. I really liked it because it had four small little sizes. They were really nice for smaller projects and it's good sizes for coasters. These two are really good sizes for a coaster. Because the resin lifts off of silicone with no problem, we're going to try one or two of these just because that way you can see how they work and if you'd want some. These are just pre-made silicone molds that we'll be pouring resin into. You might look on Amazon for a silicone molds and see what comes up and see if there's any shapes you like. They come in packs of five and six and 10 so you got lots of choices. We're also going to be making, or I am, and you can see how it's done and then try it some silicone molds ourself. What I'm using to do that is the pallet paper that you get when you're painting, disposable palette paper. I have a really big tablet of it. This is 16 by 20 because that's a nice working size. I happen to have a little hard board panel that is 16 by 20. This piece of palette paper covers that 16 by 20 perfectly for me to make my own silicone molds on, and then the resin releases right off that pallet paper. In the making of our own molds, I'm using silicone caulking. I'm going to show you in the next video how I do that. It's super easy and you'll love how easy the resin releases from the silicone and from that disposable palette paper that you get from the art store for painting. I just went to the Home Depot and got 100 percent silicone caulking. They sell it for the interior and they sell it for the exterior, does not matter which one you get. They come in clear and white and almond and maybe even black and color makes no difference. You just want it to be 100 percent silicone caulking. Then because I'm doing this class, so I'm making several different molds and we have to build the mold up with three different layers and you'll see that later in class. I went ahead and got the caulk tube. Of course then you need a caulk gun. If you're doing a bunch of these and you want to be able to make different molds, this is the most economical way because this caulk gun was $8. This tube a silicone was like $6. You may even be lucky and be able to find silicone at the dollar store and then you can get a really cheap caulk tube of the silicone. I would definitely look around at your choices there. You just want whatever you get to say 100 percent silicone, not a silicone mix. Another thing that you might look at is there's little squeezy tubes of silicone, so then you don't even need the caulk gun but this is a 10 ounces of silicone, the little squeezy tubes were less than three ounces. For the price of a couple of these in a caulk gun, for what I was doing, it was cheaper than trying a little squeezy tube. I thought I'd run out of caulking too fast. That's what we're going to build some little silicone molds. You don't have to do what we're doing with the molds, but they are really fallen and I think you're going to enjoy. At least trying them out but if you don't want to do molds, I did find some wonderful pre-cut a little wood craft pieces at the craft store. They're over there in the wood-burning supplies in Michael's and Hobby Lobby and different places like that carries Littlewood bits that you could do a little practice pieces. They're really cheap. They were less than $1, I believe on all of these, like $0.40 or $0.50 maybe. This comes [inaudible] is particularly nice. That was one option if you don't want to do your own mold. Then the other option for doing resin is to do on cradle boards and you can do any size you want. I've got six by six's here. Also have a bigger 11 by 14, just wherever it is that you're wanting to be size-wise. Cradle board is the way you want to go. I do see people use the art resin on Canvas, but I don't recommend Canvas because Canvas is appliable. Once you get resin and possibly stones on your Canvas, it sinks and all your resin sinks into the center and it's just not a good surface. You don't want to use a canvas that's stretched out on a frame. You could probably use canvas panel if you wanted, because those are hard. You just want a hard surface you could use a piece of plywood if you wanted, anything wood surface is just fine. You could also use cardboard panels if you had cheap hard board, I mean your resin sticks to hard board just fine. Just some choices there for you and things that we might take a look at here in class. We're going to be using the art resin brand. There are lots of resins out there. This is now the only one that I recommend. I have used all of the other ones at some point, I believe, including the ones you get at the hardware store. The ones you get at the hardware store, turn yellow fairly quickly. The goal here is not to make a beautiful resin piece and then have it turn yellow on you. I only recommend the art resin. It is available in the United States, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, in New Zealand. They've got ways that you can get that pretty readily. This stuff is non-toxic which I like. However, when I'm working with it, I do try to work in a big open space and then I also have a fan that I can put in my window and ventilate air to go out to keep air moving around because even though it's not toxic and has very low odor, if you're sensitive to odors or anything like that, having a fan and the window just pulls all that out for you. I love having that option. We'll be using the art resin, which is the only one I've used that's non-toxic. Conveniently, sitting out here in my art table, if you've got a really good air filter in your house, it tends to not have nearly as much dust settle in the room as I used to have when I had a cheaper filter. Sometimes I will leave the pieces sitting right out all my art table instead of putting them into my art tent but I do have inexpensive photography tent that I got off of Amazon that I sometimes will set the pieces into dry so that dust doesn't settle on them overnight. Just some different options to think of but this is the only art resin that I recommend. It has about a 45-minute time to work with it. If you see some of the other resins at the art store, some of those don't have a very long work time because there is one for jewelry. There's a casting resin or something like that but the work time is very little work time. For what we're going to be doing, we want to add some colors. We want to be able to maybe push them around and maybe put stones in them. We need that working time that this one allows us and this one doesn't turn yellow. This is the one you want. [NOISE] Another thing that I have a bunch of are little clear cups that I got at the grocery store. These are what I'm going to put a little bit of resin in to add color to. Then I have popsicle sticks that I use to mix those and to push things around on my piece of resin. These come in a couple of different sizes, I have a smaller size also, though a little bit shorter, but this is the package I have open, so that's the one I'm going to use. This is the other one I have, so quite a bit smaller. This came from the craft store over there in the kids craft area, so you might look there if you're not finding them really easily, or you might just look for popsicle sticks on Amazon. These are called craft sticks on the little one I got from the craft store. [LAUGHTER] Another thing that I've got here and these I had to think hard how to find, these are broken pieces of glass and possibly shell. These come in lots of pretty colors, I've got several shades just to play with if I choose to. I want to tell you where you find these broken bits of glass. These are used in the floral department, usually in a glass vase at the bottom of floral arrangements, so that's where I found these pre-broken pieces of glass. You could also probably find these on Amazon and you just might look for chipped glass pieces or something in that range and have a few of these to play with. Then people that are really serious about doing pretty geode art, use some natural stone like amethyst that are ground up into little gravelly pieces like this. So if you love this so much that you want to push to the next level, then you might consider getting stones out of crystals and such, like amethyst. I've got a couple of different options that we use for popping the bubbles in the resin, because once we get it poured on there and get everything set, we'll need to pop the bubbles and so I usually use a heat embossing tool and I've got several of these actually. This is the one I've got currently plugged in. Then I found this fun little tool which is recommended by the ArtResin site to have, the little Kimberly type of torch and I have a full-size torch because I've shown it to you in other resins class and in the encaustic class, but it's a big pain to get out that great big torch and be working with all of that if I don't have to. So this little tiny butane torch is the bomb. You simply take the little lid off and plug it right into the end of the torch and press and that fuels your torch and then look how easy this torch is to turn on, you simply hit the button and there you go, now you got a little torch. Then when you pick your finger back off the button, the flame stops, so that is a really nice safety feature that's on this that's not on my big torch and I like that it's tiny. For these pieces, I just need a minute of fire versus longer working time, so I do like this little tiny mini torch and this is the package that it came in and I got this at the Dick Blick. So I'm sure the torch is available at art stores and online, so if I can find this on Amazon, I'll give you a link to this exact product, but boy, do I like this fine little torch. You can use a torch or a heat tool, does not matter which one, they both were going to do the same thing for us. Now that we've talked about all of that, I've got some painter's tape and this is actually frog tape. Frog tape gives you a little bit better bond if you're doing a piece on a cradle board and you want to tape off the sides, so your drips you can peel back off. If you'll take those up with a heavy-duty tape like frog tape or a heavy painter's tape, that's how we can peel the sides back off, so I do have some of that there. What can we add to the resin to color the resin? That is going to be the most fun and you can have all fun stuff that you can color resin with. You can use any powdered pigment and I have all kinds of powdered pigment options in my art room. I really love these Parallax powdered pigments, because they make the resin paralyzed and translucent, depending on how much pearl you put in there, you could probably make it not translucent, but I do love these pearly colors of pigment. Another thing that I really love is glitter. You want to be careful with the glitter that you pick, because if you pick the big pieces of glitter, the glitter sinks to the bottom and then it looks all the glitter is on the back of your piece and you're not seeing any of it on the front of your piece. So I do like really micro fine glitter, so that it stays suspended in our resin and doesn't sink to the bottom. You'll definitely want some glitter and some type of paralyzed powder, because they are so pretty with the resin. You can also use any acrylic paint that you have, it can be the heavy bodied paint, it can be the crafty paint which these are not craft paint here like the regular clerk craft paints that you get from the craft store, but you're welcome to try those. These have less pigment in it, which is why they're so cheap. These look similar, but they actually came from the Dick Blick and they're not quite as thick as the heavy bodied, but they're not quite as loose as the fluid. So I did pick out two colors that I like to play with, the blue and yellow, but I also have fluid acrylics, those work fantastic if you can get a couple of colors of the fluid acrylics that you want to work with, love those. You can also work with acrylic ink, that makes really good to work with. Another thing that we can work with is the alcohol inks and I actually have a couple of versions of alcohol inks and I have some really pretty alcohol colors in this copic series. So I'm going to experiment with some of those on one of our pieces maybe, but you can use regular alcohol ink for color. I really love these two Pinata colors of alcohol ink, I've got the silver and the gold. Now what's really fun about these, we can mix it in with the resin and then get it on our piece, but then if we apply heat to it, sometimes you get some fun effects. Sometimes this stuff rises to the top almost and it looks like it's sitting on top of the resin instead of in the resin, almost. So I just like playing with these, just to see if we get fun effects, so I do like the silver and gold Pinata ones. You can use any pigments. If you've got paint pigments, you can use those. I probably would not use the oil paints in these, because then it might hamper the drying time of the art resin, but you can get pretty creative here with all the different types of product that I just talked about. One other thing I have over here is sculpt clay, which is clay that you bake in the oven that you get at the craft store. This is one of the experiments that I tried, because I saw it recommended at the art store and I don't recommend it. So even though I have it here and I have used it, I do not recommend it, because when you start to peel your piece, the clay sticks onto your piece and it's a big pain to try to remove the clay off all the edges, it's easy to get off but it's all over your piece, it's a pain. I have built my own free form mold with the clay but do not like it. So instead of that, I have experimented with the silicone that we were talking about, the silicone caulking, building our own mold that way, so that's actually what we're going to use. Because RP separates from the silicone without all of this rubble that you still have to clean up from the edges and these are just a couple that I was experimenting with on the clay, just to give you an example of what that might look like. One other thing I want to talk about, two other things actually, you need to level, so make sure that the piece that we're doing on our boards are level, because if it's one way or the other, your resin will draw one way or the other. I also want to talk about Posca pens and I have some Posca pens that I have used forever. When I was at the art store, I got some new ones and I actually got silver, gold, white and black, because with the resin pieces, you may want to draw some lines, just to define an area of the geode possibly, so if you're going to draw lines on the resin and then we would do a clear coat on top of that, the acrylic pens like the Posca pen is usually what I see people use and it is one of my favorite products to use in my art stuff. So I do recommend the Posca and these actually come in a whole bunch of different colors. Then you're welcome to experiment with other pens, because there are different brands out there, this just happens to be the one that I like that I'm using and I've seen several artists say the same, that they love the Posca pens. I think I've got everything that I wanted to show you that we're possibly going to be using in class, just to give you some options and some ideas. I do encourage you to do your own thing on here. If you want to copy the colors or the different projects, you're more than welcome to, but I also want you to branch out and experiment and pick some of your own favorite colors and just see what can you come up with. I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 3. Ventilation: [MUSIC] I just want to talk about safety for a moment because any kind of art material, even though it says non-toxic and low fumes, I still find it better to ventilate my space if I'm working in my art room because this is an extra bedroom in my house. I just find that the less fumes that you inhale over your lifetime, especially if you're a full-time artist or you do a lot of art, the better. Even though you don't really have to have a fan out your window, I find that this really makes the workspace more pleasant when I'm breathing just because I'm working with lots of different art materials and especially things like resins and I'm working with heat because as you heat the resin up, it could have fumes depending on if you're using a torch or a heat gun. I just find it better safe than sorry to ventilate. This is a little less than $20 room fan that I got at the Target and it just sits right there in the bottom of the window and I have it where the fan is blowing to the outside. It's pulling the air and the fumes through the room and out into the outside. This makes working in my art room for long hours really doable for me because sometimes I would be working with supplies. I'd just have the window open and then later in the day I'd have a headache. I know that something was affecting me because I had a headache. If you're ever working with any of your supplies or your resin and you start getting a headache of any kind, that is your sign that you're not working in enough ventilation and something like this is a very easy solution to that. Just put the fan in the window vented to the outside and you will fix the problems that you're having. If you put a fan in your doorway, you could even have the fan in the doorway blowing in and this pulling the air out and you have a really nice ventilation system, which is exactly what I do when I'm working with encaustic products because the encaustic is a little more toxic to work with and so I really ventilate my space really well. If I were on the main level, I'd go outside and work. But I'm on an upper level and there's no way I can take my whole art room downstairs to work out in the patio. I choose to do this very simple, inexpensive solution to ventilating my space. [MUSIC] 4. Free Form Silicone Mold: Let's take a look at creating our mold with silicone. This is going to be a free-form geode shape and you can free-form it out without drawing anything if you want or if you want to follow an exact shape, you could use something like a Stabilo pencil. This is just a piece of our disposable palette paper that I got at the Dick Blick. It comes in lots of different sizes. This is like the big 16 by 20. I also have this smaller pad that's gray. This is like a 12 by 16. You can also get this palette paper and a 9 by 12 and probably smaller but I thought for this class on just to have enough space for resin to do what I want to do like on one piece of paper, I've got six little free-form shapes to make some small ones, and I've got two big ones. So you could do two big ones. Then on this paper, I'm going to do one larger one. You're going to see the light, the other sizes that I've already started later in class because it'll be different projects that we're working on but I'm going to show you how I'm doing these templates. Free-form silicone molds here, starting with our palette paper. This is just not attached to my board, but if this is something you wanted to tape down to your board and you're ready to work on it, then definitely you could use something like the frog tape to tape it down. But because I'm not ready to start pouring resin, I'm going to go ahead and leave it loose for a moment. Then when I put these over here for resin and I'll tape them down so they don't move while I'm working on them. I'm thinking maybe a medium-size piece and you can just see how this pencil just draws right on that palette paper for us. Don't have to be exact where you get it on that paper has good on the paper, and then decide to, if you want to have a hole in it, like a geode sometimes has holes in it or if you want it to be more solid with rock in the middle of it. Because if you see our inspiration piece, this is solid with the fun, glassy look here in the middle. You can just decide based on the little samples that you look out when you're looking around at geodes, do you want a hole in it or not? I believe I'm going to do this one. Maybe with a hole. Why not? You don't want it to be too big. I'm going to just maybe like that and maybe have rock up near this side, and maybe some rock out there and maybe color in the middle. We could do all fun things here. I'm going to make a little hole. Why not. Then I've got my silicone caulking and I have the intake because I managed to throw away the lid at some point. If you throw the way the lid and you want to and you haven't used at all, then just tape the top. Then you can take the tape off when you're ready to use again. All I'm going to do, I've got this in here. I'm just pulling the handle to get the caulk out. I'm just going to very loosely follow this line that I've given myself. We're going to do two or three different layers depending on how high we want to build this up. It's not just one swipe of the caulk gun and we're done. We're going to lay the caulk down. We're going to let that dry, probably an hour or so. We'll put another layer and let that dry an hour or so. Then we'll decide if it's tall enough for us or not. The edges are not going to be perfectly smooth like they are if we were doing this pre-made mold because geodes are natural and organic. If we look at our sample pieces here, these are not completely flat and straight there. There's some variation. It's coming out of a rock. We're going to have edges that mimic the rock there. I'm going to lay the first layer down and then we'll let that dry. I'll lay the second layer down. Then we'll decide is that high enough? It's really better to be a little bit too high than too short. Because if it's too short and you put too much resin into your mold, it'll spill over the sides. While that is fixable, we would rather avoid it. I'm going to go ahead and just start and I'm going to lay this first-line down. I am actually touching the paper as I'm doing this because it gives me a little bit more control. Separate there. So I'm touching the paper, it gives me a little more control. It is helping me make sure that maybe I should take it for filming. Hang on. Gives me a little more control. Lets me make sure that hopefully, I'm getting a good seal because we've got this down, we want to make sure that there's no gaps underneath the silicone for the resin to seep out. Let's try this again so our paper doesn't move. When I didn't have a camera sitting right here, it was much easier to not worry about the paper moving. I am touching the paper. That is just helping me make sure I've got a good seal onto the paper so that we have hopefully no gaps running under it. If you get a part that's super thin, not a big deal, we can come back over it, and then when we come up with our next layer, we'll definitely have it built up by then but see, I can just come right back on top of it. Not a big deal. Then I will do the same here in the middle. Now once you've got the first layer set, then we might take a paper towel and a wood stick and just go back and make sure that anything that we don't like, at this point, we can clean it up. I can actually do something like this with the paper towel and I can come back around and smooth out any weird ledge that I created as I was laying this down. That'll give me a nice edge there. Then I could also just come right back along this one. Hang on. I'm not left-handed, so it's harder to, and there we go. We can smooth that to whatever we wanted that to look like. Then I could just take the paper towel and last little clean up there and little clean up there. That's looking pretty good for our first layer. We're going to let that dry for an hour. Then I'm going to come back and we'll put another layer on this and build it up just a bit. This has been sitting for about an hour, went and ate lunch and came back and it's dry to the touch. You see I can touch that and it's dry. Now what we're going to do is we're just going to layer another layer up and build that sidewall a little bit larger. Once we do that, if we plan on adding more layers then say two, then you'd actually want a third sidewall up there. It really depends on how thick we end up going as to how tall we'd really want this because you want to have all the resin stay inside. You don't want to have the resin spilling over at any point. It's really better to have it too tall and too short. Some of this is a little bit low. I may have to come back with a third layer anyway. When I want to stop this, I push this out to the outside so that I don't have a line on the inside that would be on my bottom of my geode. If you want to pull it to the outside when you want to stop, you'll have this line inside. It gets on your geode. If you have a hole in here to stop it, I'm going to pull it to the inside of the hole because we're not going to have any resin here in this hole. Now I'm going to let this layer dry. Then we'll be back to add maybe a third one to make sure we're up high enough and to make sure that we have no little gaps or holes that are in-between the two layers because you don't want your resin seeping between that. We could come in and we could fill any little extra spots that we needed to. We'll let that dry for another hour and then we'll come back and do the third layer. I've let that sit for another hour. Now we're back for our third layer. What I've also done is went back to the hardware store. Because what I think I'm going to do, and this is the little tube silicone, doesn't matter if it's white clear or whatever, but it's a nice, convenient size versus the big, bulky one in the gun. After I get that third layer on and let it dry, I'm going to take this littler one and very slightly go around the edges and then smooth it in with either my little wood stick or a paper towel on my finger and just get it into any of these grooves that are up underneath here. So that I don't have any weird jagged edges sticking out when we pull our piece of resin out of here. Just to as a side note, this stuff, this palette paper, nothing basically sticks to it for long, which is why it's so good for stuff like this but these free-form templates that we're making here with the silicone, that means they're not actually going to stick thread either. I can come right over here and pull at it and pull it off. This is a temporary onetime use if you make these on this palette paper. If you want to make these permanent and you want to use them over and over again, then what you want to do is use a silicone sheet of stuff. Those are usually like kitchen goods because silicone sticks to silicone and then you can not get that mold backup. If you want a more permanent free-form mold that you want to make over and over, then this sheet needs to be silicone instead of like this palette paper that we're using. You don't have to use the palette paper either. If you've got some plastic or sheet acetate, those would be fine. The thing I would caution you with on plastic like the Saran wrap, the kitchen plastic is when we apply heat to it, those wrinkle up underneath and so you'll have wrinkles on the bottom side of your piece of art. While I'm using this, this is a one-time use thing. I'm just going to add a third layer onto here. Then once I feel like that's dry, I'm going to come back and just really at the very bottom here seal on all of my little templates there so that I don't have any resin that get up under a little seam that wetten all the way down and make a jagged edge because even though it's adhered to the paper, there are still spots where it can just jump up under there. I'd rather that be all nice and even and not an edge that's going to create some sharp on our finished piece of art. I'm just going to go ahead and built up one more layer. You can make these as high as you want, but I do recommend you make sure it's high enough. [NOISE] You don't want any dips. Just make sure if you've got a dip, you go fill that dip in. Then you see I'm just smoothing it off and putting the extra off on the outside because it really doesn't matter what's outside of our little mold here. It doesn't matter that the edges are not perfectly straight either because again looking at our geode rock inspiration, this is not a perfectly straight edge either. We're really mimicking as true to form as we can what that side of that geode might actually look like if it were a real geode. [NOISE] Once you've got three layers built up pretty good, then we're just going to double-check that there's no air pockets anywhere and that we don't have any sharp edges at the bottom when I fill in here with this a little bit at the bottom clevis there. We'll be ready to pour some resin tomorrow into our mold. You can stop at one layer. I'm probably going to do more than one layer on our resins just because it adds some depth and some interests and really builds that piece visually, which is why we've gone up as high as we've gone. Seam will come in and fill this in a little better. We're going to go ahead and just let this dry overnight. You can use it after an hour or so if you start building this up in the morning and then later in the afternoon, you're ready to go back and start your resin. You're welcome to do that because this particular one I'm using says ready in an hour, but I'm going to go ahead and let these dry overnight and start fresh in the morning. I changed my mind. I'm actually going to show you here on this one what I'm doing to fill in a little side gaps with my thing of silicone, so you have an idea of exactly what I'm doing. I'm just going to have a piece of paper towel handy. I'll cut it in half and make it easier. What I'm going to do, this is my little six piece of the organic small geode shapes so that I can take each piece and do different colorways and test out what I might like my bigger geodes to look like if I happen upon a colorway that I absolutely love. This is a good way to experiment without making a great big piece and then deciding, I've used all the wrong colors or something. This is what I'm doing. You want to be real careful once this dries, not to pull on it at all. Because remember I said it's not going to stick to the paper. This is silicone. If you work it enough, comes right up. You don't want to have this piece come up at all. Be very careful in touching that piece but that being said, I've cut a little angle here on my little caulk tube and I'm just very gently going to go right around that bottom seam. Because I'm really trying to eliminate the seam itself so that we don't end up with little jagged edges out the backside of our piece. Once I've got a little edge on there, let's go ahead and get the rest of it. I do like to be able to move this around. This is also our last little chance here before we start pouring resin to fill any holes that we might have created in one of our sidewalls accidentally, depending on how we have put our caulking. If you made it and there's like a little hole anywhere in that sidewall, fill that in right now. This is the chance to catch those before we start pouring resin and it seats off the side on us. I'm just going all the way around. Where did I stop there? To get the seam. Then to really smooth that out for us, I'm just going to take this paper towel on my finger and run it right along the edge so that that is no longer a sharp seam. It's a curved filled-in seam. The bottom part of our geode will have a nice smooth finish rather than a jagged edge that went up under that seam. Then once you feel like you've got it all, wipe. Just double-check and make sure you didn't miss a spot. That's how we're going to finish this after you get your two or three sidewall layers on here. Then I just double-check and make sure there's no holes in my sidewall also. I fill that in with a little bit of silicone. Once you get your sidewalls on, do one last little loop on the inside seam there. Then we'll be ready to pour resin tomorrow because I'm going to go ahead and let these setup overnight before I pour stuff in them. I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 5. Mixing Resin: [MUSIC] All right. So the first thing I'm going to talk about is mixing our resin. The resin comes in two parts, you've got the resin and the hardener. You're going to mix an equal amount of each of these into a third container, and then stir it for three minutes. So I have put the same amount hardener and resin into my cups here, and I'm just using these little clear cups because they've got like a little ring at the top, and I just fill them up to the exact same amount. So I knew that I had an exact 50/50 quantity. Then I have a third container that I'm just going to pour these into, and that way I know that I've got the right amount of resin in my container. I would say that's probably a cup-and-a-half, maybe a little more, but I think that's probably a cup-and-a-half, and I'm mixing quite a bit of the clear resin so that when we do our first project, we have plenty of resin to start off with. Because the first project is going to be the little six pieces, and I want to be able to mix lots of colors in little cups, and these are little cups that we're going to use for that. I want to be able to mix lots of colors. So to start with, I mix the resin, and then once you got that going, you've got about 45 minutes of work time with the resin. So that's why I don't mind mixing up enough to do all six of those. There is a calculator on the art resin website that helps you guesstimate the correct amount of resin for the size piece that you're going to do, if you want to get a little more exact and not waste any of your resin material. But I just guesstimate because I can always mix up more, and I always have these little silicone molds, prefab molds, that I can use the extra resin in to make an extra little something so that I'm not wasting any of the resin. Because resin is not cheap, so you don't want to be wasteful. I want to mix up enough. Hopefully, not so much that I've just like totally blown out how much I need, and I can always make another piece. It's not like I don't have, say, another board here that I could be working on or some other little silicone pieces, or maybe I have some little pieces I could pour some. So always have a backup plan if you mix too much. With this mixing, you want to mix it for three minutes with the art resin, and even though this is non-toxic and really doesn't have a strong smell, I still do safety precautions. So you probably hear a little fan running because I've got the fan in the window pulling the air through the room so that I've got some nice ventilation. Because if you're working in a small room with little ventilation, that's not really recommended. You want to have some sort of ventilation while you're working with the resin. So work in your garage or work outside or work in a room where you've got some airflow, and to make the airflow, I've got my fan in the window turned on so that we're pulling air through the house, and pulling this, any fumes that may occur out. Because even though it doesn't really have a strong smell, if you're sensitive in any way, just better to pull it out. So you mix this for three minutes, and then once you feel like you've got it nice and mixed, and you're ready to start, we've got quite a bit of resin in there. So now we're going to start our first project, and we'll talk about how we're going to mix some of those colors in our first project. So I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 6. Clean Room: [MUSIC] This is my photography tent and it is the tent that I use to set resin pieces in. Then I close this little top here and that's how I keep dust from flying around and landing on my resin pieces. It's like you've created a little small clean room within your space. This is how I'm going to put our bigger resin piece in just to make sure that we don't have dust and stuff settle on our resin pieces. Ideally, if you put all your pieces in your little clean room to dry overnight, then you'll keep any dust from settling on top of those. Because we're actually going to add another layer resin on top of these larger pieces tomorrow. If you had a piece of dust land on this layer, it's not a big deal because it's not our finished layer and anything that we pour on top of that will just incorporate that piece of dust in it and you'll never even know it's there. But this is the system that I use to have a little clean space in my room so I can put my resin pieces in there and I can let them dry overnight. There's no dust that settles on and I'm ready the next day for whatever I need to do with my projects. I'll give you a link. This is a photography light tent and mine is about a 30 by 30, I think. I'll give you an Amazon link. They're very inexpensive just to show you what I'm using. I've even seen people use, if you needed a little bit bigger, you could do like a temporary plant setup that I've seen using the polyethylene product. There's different options you can do to do a cheap, clean room in your house. These actually come pretty big. You might even get these up to four or five feet large. You could do some really large pieces. Then this folds up and fits in the closet. It folds up like a reflector does, which is why I really love it. This is my little clean space that I make for resin pieces. I just want to show you one of my pieces sitting in my clean room tent. This is my cheap photography tent. I made sure everything was level. You can see I've got my level out here and I made sure that my tent floor was level because we don't want to set something in our tent to dry and then it shift one direction or another on this. If I'm worried about dust, because if I'm putting resin on a photograph, I'm really worried about dust because it's a big deal. It shows up instantly, I'm worried about dust, then I will take a wooden skewer, the kind that we cook with, and I have a little skewer here. Let me just grab this. I will take a wooden skewer out this right here, wooden skewers, I have little ones, and I will run a flashlight over the surface and get down to eye level with my piece. Just make sure there's no dust that settled on there and if there is, and you have to do this right away, you can't wait a couple of hours and come back and do it. You have to do it while you're still within your 45 minutes of working time for that resin. But if I have something, a piece of dust or something in there, I will simply tap the dust into the resin and then it will self-level back over itself. Or I might dig the dust out if it's something that's big enough, you can just pull it out. If you tap it in, it'll just become part of the piece and you'll never see it. Then once I'm sure I've got all the dust out of there, I will then close the tent, and then I won't look at that again until tomorrow. I will let that dry all night in that clean space. I just wanted to show you what you're going to do if you want to use a little clean room [MUSIC] 7. Small Geodes: [MUSIC] Here's our first project. You want to be real careful not to be knocking into your molds. I did see a fun little trick that somebody else did with their molds, how I layered it on top of each other, and then came back in with a little bit of this clear silicone and really filled in that bottom edge. I saw somebody else do their layers of silicone, and then while silicone was still pliable, just a couple of minutes after putting it on their paper, they put soap on their hands like Dawn dishwashing soap and came through and smoothed that with their fingers, and I thought that was a pretty neat trick. Everybody has a little trick out there. Now one of the first things that you want to make sure you do is you want to make sure your table is level. What I did here with my board not having to level sitting here on here is I leveled at this direction and I leveled it on this direction, and I made sure my bubble was sitting in the middle of our lines there. The way I leveled my surface here was I just took a couple of these wooden paddles and however many thickness that I needed, I slipped that under my work surface here and leveled it up. You want that surface to be level, you don't want any of this spilling out of your mold and you don't want it crooked from it not being a level surface. I'm going to mix some colors into little clear plastic cups, and I'm going to treat each of these six little tiny geode pieces as a separate piece of art. I'm not doing all six in the same color. I'm going to just pick a variety of colors and start each one differently as a way to experiment and figure out what colors I might want to do a larger piece. I actually saw something recently that had a yummy maroon and yellow colorway in it, and I thought that was pretty cool. When we're making these little cups of color, I'm going to start with this one because I thought that's really neat-looking I'm going to try it out. You only want really just a couple of drops of color in there. Geodes are translucent, so I want to see the sun come through these pieces possibly. I'm going to start off with just a couple of drops of color, I can always add more. I might even want some shimmery stuff in that color. So I can add that now or I can add it when I've started mixing my resin. I can also do some pearlescent. We might just take a little bit of this. If you're using thicker paints, you really want to be careful how much paint you put in these because you don't want any more than about 10 percent paint to resin ratio because anything more than that it's just too much. That's the brown. Here we go. I want to try these colors, maybe this powder, I might put some glitter in those colors, and I want to try the gold alcohol ink. This was acrylic ink on those two because that's the ones I had recently got in these fun colors. You can have as many colors as you want. You can have a whole rainbow of colors if you want to. On the first one, I'm going to keep it like maybe one level, I'm going to mix this really good. I really like the way the gold does because it lays on top almost and shimmers really pretty. Just a little bit of your alcohol ink in there because that still goes a long way, and we might have one or just glitter in it. Let's say we're going to do five, and I did gold and translucent color, and yellow and red, and my glitters I have just a whole little selection here. I might do the gold glitter since I've got the gold there. I like this little container because I just roll it around and put the glitter in. I might just add a little bit of glitter in these so that they're shimmery. Then let's start adding our resin, so I've already stirred this up pretty good. We're doing tiny pieces, so it's not like I need every cup to be very full, so I'm just going to mix a little bit. If I have enough resin or I need to do two of these each then it is what it is, and I'll do two of them in the same color because remember, we don't want to waste any of our resin once we've mixed it up. Always want to have like the next colorway going. At this point too, because this stuff does go pretty fast, I could actually mix a whole next set of colors to see. I'm actually just going to take my wood stick and mix that up. I'll put about an inch of color in there, and you can see it's shimmery and pink. Because this goes so fast, I think that's what we'll do. Let's go ahead and just get a bunch of stuff ready. This is where we want to experiment with color. We want to experiment with the glitter. We want to experiment with some of our rocks that we have, our little chopped up rocks. Look at that color. I do like that it's got the shimmeries in it. That is really pretty. Then if you think you didn't get enough shimmery stuff in it, feel free to add more, but it's really better to add a little bit less to begin with, and then add a little bit more than to have too much to start with. Because if you have more than that 10 percent of paint in here, you actually compromise the resin so you don't want to ruin your resin right here at the beginning. That's not enough gold, so let's put some more gold in there. That's a really pretty start for this one, and I'm going to really quickly, because I have a feeling that that's more than one geodes worth of color. So let's just go ahead and maybe introduce some other colors real quick so that we're just ready. This is the fluid acrylic in this teal color and you just want a few drops. You don't want so much that it's super opaque. That could have even been too much, but we're just going to go for it and see what we get. This resin stuff gets all over everything, so make sure you're wearing your gloves. Let's use this lighter color. You need to make sure that any surface that you don't want to get this resin on, you cover in something or set your resin tub on a paper towel or something because it's dripping down the container and I don't really want resin all over my woods surface, but I don't care if it's all over this palette surface. Because it comes right up off of the palette surface. I'm just going to go ahead. I do want some clear leftover possibly. Look how pretty that color is. I want to mix enough colors that we're not wasting our resin over here. I'm going to do that on one, maybe with some silver. Yeah, let's do the silver. This might be enough for all six, I don't know. We're just going to play with this selection of colors, whatever I mix up here, and see if we get anything we like because I want this to be inspiration for one of our larger pieces. There's that. I do want a little bit of clear leftover just in case. Then what else do we have over here? We have this pretty gold, which is completely different than that bright gold. Maybe we'll mix up a little of this. Really pretty. This is again a fluid acrylic in the yellow oxide color. Just a splat of that. Two, we could add glitter to these, but I think I might, real quick, go back and add some glitter to those. Look at that. That's a pretty color, that's a little deeper than that brighter yellow. Maybe I'll use that. I don't know, maybe I'll use that with one of these. What color of glitter? Maybe some gold glitter. That's a lot of glitter. When you're using a glitter, you want that micro glitter. You don't want the big heavy. That is very glittery. You want the micro glitter, not the very big heavy glitter because the micro glitter will stay suspended, and the very big, gigantic chunks of glitter sink to the bottom. That's pretty. Let's do that. I do like these yummy shimmery bits in there, really pretty. Let's start with that. I've got a little bit of clear leftover if I need to mix any more color or if I need to top with clear to top it off because I think on these, I'm just going to do the one layer to begin with. We might put some rocks in some of these. I'm going to get rocks. We can put the rocks on now and work around it or we can put the rocks on at the end. I think what I'm going to do on this first one is, and this is chip glass, I'm going to go ahead and put some of the chip glass in. Let's do this two different ways just to experiment. Put some chip glass in and that will shimmer in the light, even if we cover it with a resin. Then on the second one, I think I'm going to put the resin down, and then put the chip glass in because you don't have to be all one way or the other. You can do this one way. Then we can put all the resin in and we can put glass on top of that. Either way would work just depends on how you want to do it. Let's do that. You want to work on these from the outside in. I have a heat gun handy, and my other heat gun died right in the middle of me doing this. So I went ahead and pulled out the other embossing tool that I have. I'm just going to start with, what do I want to start with? Let's just go with the gold, glittery stuff. Just remember, if you pull this out, see it drips where it shouldn't, keep in mind where everything is. I don't want to pour it all at one time. I just want to pour a tiny amount because it's self-leveling, so it's going to spread out. I'm going to start with that. Then you want to just start layering in your other colors. We're just going to layer these on top of each other. Beside each other. We're looking to create some colors and some color depths here. Let's go with that pink. After you get this first, initial layer down, we're going to go back. Look at that. We're going to go back and possibly layer on top of some of these. I could come back and add another ring right on top of a ring that I've already created. We're just creating rings of color. Now they are going to jump into each other a little bit because that's the nature of this stuff. It spreads and when we add stuff on top, we spread it a more. We can wait a little bit if we wanted to, and then we could actually go back and add some more if we let it thicken a little bit. It's really trial error and practice with your geodes. That's why I like doing these little bitty pieces because now I can figure out what have I done, and what do I have left, and where do I not have, say like these stones covered? What color do I really want to be peeking through here when I'm done? Then as you're pouring, be super aware, hyper-aware of the height that you've created and the walls that you have, because you can't make your walls taller at this point, so you don't want any resin spilling out. Now that's very interesting. I think for this particular one, I'm going to leave that because I think that is particularly beautiful. We're going to move on to the next one and you'll notice we got plenty of those colors leftover. I'm going to still experiment with some of these. I think this time, I'm going to start off with this weird yellow color. I'm trying my best not to make a mess, but try to hold your sticks over like these inner areas so that you don't ruin everything. If you have a drip, it doesn't matter. I'm going to add some more of this pink because that was really pretty. Another thing that we can do that I did not mention was we can mix two colors in one cup and stir slightly and just see what we get with the two colors mixing but not completely mixed up. That's another trick you could try too, because then you'll get a little more of a kaleidoscope-y color going. Let's put this in the middle. Another thing you can do is if you want to introduce a little bit of color on one of these without pouring it on, you can get some on your stick and now your stick is your applicator piece. That's a way to introduce really thin stripes or introduce the color in the middle of another color, because really, with the geode pieces, your thought process here is how can I get these colors to layer up its layers. It's circles and layers. I'm actually going to experiment here with the heat gun. See if I can push some of the color into each other. [NOISE] Can you see how we do that? We can get it push a little bit. [NOISE] Which is another reason why you really want to have some good ventilation, because if we're pushing color into other things you're heating that resin up and you do want to have some ventilation when you're heating these up. I'm actually going to maybe use one of these and introduce some white. Let's see if we've got a white over here in all of this acrylics that are hitting. Well, I don't like that color. Maybe this color. I'm going to actually do an iridescent. It's another iridescent and I think it's probably the same color tones is that little one we just did. You see, we're taking awhile here. It's probably good that we have 45 minutes of work time because you want to experiment here. So it goes faster if you already have all your colors mixed up, it really does go quite a bit faster. Now I have this iridescent, I'm just going to put this right onto here. [NOISE] One thing that you could also do is with these inks, you could introduce the ink on top, maybe on a stick, and then heat it up and we may be able to create some of those little cells, pretty cells. Sometimes, if we get it thick enough in our resin, let me just introduce some more of this into this resin. I'm really loving that first one. If we have enough ink in here, we can really get it to do some fun stuff. Actually, let's go around some here. Let's see if we apply some heat, if we got anything. [NOISE] That's just sitting on top, but it is mixing and spreading really pretty. If I just sprinkle it on the top. Look at that. [NOISE] Now, that really pushed around really nice. [NOISE] That's really pretty. What if we add some sparkles on top of that just to experiment with sparkles on top? Maybe we'll do it in the center and see. I'll put these in a little cup on. This too, you want to have gloves on when you're doing all that, but what if we sprinkled some right here in the middle. That one went way off by itself. If you have something go off by itself, we're just going to take a stick and we can move it back around. Not a big deal. Another thing too, that we can consider is you can take a stick and waved it through your stuff, and we could mix color with a stick. So don't be afraid to possibly drag stuff through your piece too to see what you could get. I'm going to add some more to the center part. Then when we're all done and it's dry, if we add any that didn't stay in the resin, it'll just pop back off for us but other than that, the resin is the glue. So I'm just going to pull that big piece out of there. I don't like it. Then when you got some in there and you think, "Okay. I like that," we can either go for that. I could pour a little bit of clear on top. If you're going to do that and then do the clear on top, we need to let that dry and do that tomorrow. We could come back on any of the others and fill to the clear on top also. Before I let these go too far and we do the next one, I actually want to use the heat gun or the torch, and I want to get all the bubbles out. Let's just use the little torch. You want to very quickly just skim over the top of this so you pop any bubbles that's on your piece. Shouldn't be any bubbles in that second one. I don't feel that backed up. Let's just use the heat gun right here, [NOISE] and then just pop in the bubbles. Now, the thing I like about the torch is it doesn't move stuff around really, because it's a very lightweight torch, and my heat gun is really strong, so it does move stuff around. If you're not wanting to move too much, then use the torch or a lighter setting on your heat gun. Those are pretty cool. I might do a clear layer on the top of this one because it's still sunk down, and let's just move on to the third one because we're on a time limit here and we can always mix up more resin and continue on. Don't feel like you have to fill everything the very first time you try. I think I want this one to be in silvers of blue and colors of blue and green. Let's go ahead with this second colorway and fill some of these up. Do we want rocks or do we not want rocks? Maybe we could go for some of these teal colored rocks. Let's do one without the rocks, and then I'll do the rocks in the next one. I also have some cut seashells over there that are really cool, so we could actually do something with those. Those are really, really pretty, but I think I'd want to maybe put those on top. I don't know. It's all about experimenting. We're going to work from the outside in now and work a little quicker on this one. Let's mix our colors a little. [NOISE] I actually liked it so much on this one. When I just dripped the gold on top. Then I'm, I'll do it again with the silver. Then get that to really push that color around. Look at that. Let's go immediately. [NOISE] Very well, it was a really good lesson. I just used way too much silver perhaps. I'm going to let that sit a second and then come back and heat it again, and see if I can get it to break up because that just covered the whole top. That was a fun experiment. [NOISE] What would happen if I just ran my little skippy around it? That is rather dramatic there with the amount of color we put on the top of that with the silver. Definitely be sparing with the silver color because it'll dominate. [NOISE] We're going to come back to that one. I think that's a fail. Just be super careful with the amount of this metallic color that we put on top. I might just experiment with that one more time. I mean I think it's fun for you to see right in the center. I think it's fun for you to see my failures as well as my successes so that you learn from your mistakes or from my mistakes. That maybe you won't do what I just did because you saw me do it and told you not to. [LAUGHTER] I'm really digging this pink and orange, and which really makes me happy after seeing the bigger art piece that I saw that had the pretty pink and orange in it are pink and yellow. I do feel a bigger piece of that in our future. [LAUGHTER] I don't know, what do you think if we introduced this weird color to this? Just for the sake of experimenting, maybe completely ugly. [LAUGHTER] That's fun though, of testing these out. If you'll look at Pinterest at different real geode pieces, that's always a fun way to see what different color combinations might really be occurring in nature, because geodes are natural, but at the same time, it could be a good way to experiment with something that you just never even thought. I'm going to try this gold a little bit and we're going to be much more careful with the amount of gold I put on here. We're watching the gold spread out, because it like shimmers and bubbles when you're doing that. I love looking at the way it does that. We could probably put that right in the center and then let it shimmer out and that'd be the center of our geode. [NOISE] That's pretty cool what that did right there. I think I will go back in and put some pretty chips in there. Go back with this, this champagne colored little chips are my favorite. [inaudible] , [NOISE] put these in with any color resin and they would be just perfect. Maybe I'll do a few around the edge if I can get these to come out good. Now you want to be careful if you're pouring little pieces like this in that we're not pushing our resin over any edge because we're adding volume when we put these little rocks in there. It's moving everything around. I didn't want that in the middle. It's moving everything around. Let's see here. We don't want to put so many rocks in here that we run over the edge. Just keep that in mind. That's fun around the edge. Let's call that one a fun. I'm pretty happy with the way that I did. I'm just going to hit it with the heat gun one more time and make sure there's no bubbles. [NOISE] I think because that happened to that one, we could go ahead and just put some rock pieces in there and see if we can shove some of the colors around. I'm going to mix these two because, you know what? This is pieces of glass, like a mirror. How fun is that? Pieces of mirror, super fun. [NOISE] That's pretty fun laying on there like that. You might tape on some paper towels on your heat gun around where are you going to hold it, just in case because I keep picking this up with gloves that have resin on it. You want to maybe not get this all over the handle if you want to keep it clean or maybe wrap paper tower around that. So every time you pick it up, you're not putting resin on it like I am [LAUGHTER], because this stuff gets everywhere. I'd say one, this looks beautiful. That one could be a failure. [LAUGHTER] We're still working our way around. Let's go ahead and just start on this one. Let's just try silver. I can make some more colors, but really my goal here is to not waste any of our resin also. We're just going to give it a try with so mix up. I would say mix up 10 colors that you want to experiment with and start laying them in there, and seeing what you get. That's what I would probably recommend because I've got two, four, six, eight, 10, 11, plus the clear. I actually did 11. Maybe a dozen little mixes of color and just see what you can come up with. Then I like to go back in here and ring some color. Let's see if we can get that to look good. I mixed about 10 because one of these is, remember, is glass. We like this colorway, I guess we'll make some golden because gold is what I have a lot of. [LAUGHTER] Now that one is really looking pretty, check that out. [NOISE] I'm making a mess on everything. Let's go ahead and get some paper towel. Then I can pick the heat gun up with. This stuff gets everywhere. [NOISE] Now that is really, really pretty. What if we just did a drop of gold, maybe in the center? Then super sparingly here. [LAUGHTER] [NOISE] Look what that did. One drop and then hit with the heat gun, gave us the most beautiful center and a little ring around there. How gorgeous is that? What am I might do is one more drop and then we'll try to make the whole thing ring out. Way too much gold. Crap. That was more than one drop. [MUSIC] That's doing some pretty fun stuff, I think. We could leave that like that. It does have some really pretty shimmery color going there. We could also come back and maybe put a couple of rings of color and just well, I don't know, that's awfully pretty now. [LAUGHTER] Let's just let that do its thing, and I may have to put a coat of clear on it tomorrow, but if you could see the way the gold is doing in there. I'll leave that now. Sometimes you could do too much like we did on that first one and just mess it up, and I don't want to mess that up because now it's really turning out pretty. Let's go ahead and use this last bit of pink here and the yellow and just see what we can mix up for this last piece. Then I would say that I did a really good job of using all the colors that we've mixed here. Let's put this pink in the center, so that I won't have a whole bunch of extra leftover. Thank goodness. [NOISE] Until you see this put together in a geode, you'd really think that yellow and this pink would be completely obnoxious. Would you ever have imagined that they would turn out good because if I just saw those colors on the shelf, I would not have picked them. [LAUGHTER] I think one of my pieces that I do on the bigger one is definitely going to be the pink. [LAUGHTER] Because this first one over here is just stunning and can you imagine having a bigger piece done in that or even a whole series? That may be my series that I do. Actually, I like both colorway that I've picked out here though. Pretty good job. [LAUGHTER] Now I'm just running down my inks here. My colors, just running down what's left. What's really fun is after these dry, because on the larger pieces, we may do more than one layer. Most likely you'd want to do two or three or four layers, and just seeing how the colors combine and what you don't want to do, like put too much silver on that, that's actually started now to re-coagulate there in the middle. That's pretty cool to see how that's reacting now. I still got some clear here, so I think I'm going to pour some clear on here, because this one is not filling up so fast. Let's take our heat gun, see put a paper towel on it and keep it much cleaner. [MUSIC] [NOISE] Now, that's really pretty the way the pink spread out to the edges. I'm going to put a piece of gold in here. Then doing real slow, so I only get two drops, not 12. [LAUGHTER] There we go. Now let's run that gold around. [MUSIC] It's very interesting the way the gold starts going back to the center. I think I'll heat this one again real quick. [MUSIC] Since I had a little bit of working time, I went back to that one and I really like the way that separate it back out. That's pretty cool, what it's doing. I think for now, I'm going to call one a failure. [LAUGHTER] Five of these are looking really pretty and I can't wait till they are dry, and we can pull them out of our molds here. Then I'll be able to show you how we finish those edges up. Because they may come out perfect and they may come out needing a little bit of help. I got a couple of different ways to show you how I might finish these off but for now, we have to let these sit and dry. [LAUGHTER] I'm going to put these in my photography tent and let them sit overnight and I'm going to move on to the next project. [MUSIC] 8. Small Geodes finishing up: So we have let these dry overnight, and I'm going to go ahead and start taking these out of their molds, because these are just worn layer pieces to begin with, and then, we'll have a second layer, if we decide to do another clear coat on top, depending on how we decide to finish the edges. I'm going to show you in the edge video, our different edge choices for finishing the edges, and I've just got some glass on here that we're picking up. There we go. So all we have to do, let me take this tape off up here, is to start taking these out of here, and these have only been sitting for 24 hours, so it's still got another couple of days to actually be fully cured, but you want to do this part at the 24 hours because the sides are still pliable enough, where you could do something with it if you needed to sand it or something, it's not completely hard. I'm just going to pull these out just like this, and you see how easy that comes off. If I do it carefully enough, I might not dislodge. I did. Since I said it, had to happen, but once you dislodge it, this is no longer usable and you just have to throw it away. But looking amazing, this one turned out like I am stoked at how beautiful that is. This one the sides come up a little bit, so it might be one that we consider doing another layer of resin on it. What that'll do is, any spots that we have here on the edges, we're going to clean those up a little bit, and then when we put the clear on top, and let it drip over again, that'll really smooth out and make the sides pretty and shiny. But how beautiful is that? I love that. So let's go ahead and pull the others out. Now, this one really could use a second layer in mold, and they're still soft so you want to be careful not to really bend them too far, as you're pulling. You want to be real careful because there's still a little bit pliable, not completely cured. Look how pretty that is, oh my goodness. The back is pretty too, and you can see what sinks to the back of these quite a bit of glitter or sunk down. If we had used the real heavy glitter and we wouldn't have had any glitter stay up on the top side. So you can tell that some stuff sinks to the back and just is what it is. But look how beautiful that one turned out. This one will definitely want to make it a little thicker. Let's see. So really, we had plenty of room in these to do like to layer little molds, but I'm okay with the one layer, that one turned out really beautiful. That in the back is really pretty too, love that. I think it's poured out so easily. So pretty. Even this one that I thought was a complete fail. Look at the backside of that one. This one that I thought was a complete fail actually ended up looking pretty decent. So it's not my favorite, but I don't hate it. Let just pull this last one out. The back, this one is still pretty to look at that. So we have a couple of different options that we can use to finish the sides of our pieces. So we can pour another code of resin on the top, and let it cascade over to really give it a nice completely finished edge. Because when you pull it out of your mold, you've got a definite edge where it stopped. It's a definite same, and if we pour another coat on top, and let that go over, that might finish that seem off and level it up really nicely for us. So that's one option, and we'll do that on a couple of these because some of them, at the very edge, lifts up and I don't want it to do that. The second option is if you're really happy with the height and the way it looks, like I'm pretty happy with this one, after I go through and do a little work on the edges and I'll tell you what that entails in just a moment, then you might consider some type of guilt edge because that is so very popular, and I have some gold guilt sheets that we could do that with, you could also probably do that with a metallic paint if you wanted, but we're going to guilt ours. So that's a couple of different options that we can do to finish the edges, but we have a little bit of cleanup work to do before we do that. You do that with sandpaper, which is why we're going to need some other type of coating for the sides, because once we send on this in any way, it's obvious and we get rid of our shine. While it is in this state right here, we have a couple of different ways that we can get rid of the hanger ons and make it smoother. You can use a pair of heavy-duty shears, and these aren't regular kitchen shears, they are heavy-duty shears, like heavy-duty kitchen shears, and you can just cut off any hanger ons that you have there. If you have a whole area that you don't like, you can just go through and trim it just like this. You see I just trimmed the whole piece off of that. You do see that I've done something there, when you do that, so that's why we want to either guilt edge or paint the edge or a new layer of the resin so that we finish it off completely, and we're happy with it. After the first 24 hours, it's still pliable enough, where we can just trim a little piece off where we need it. I do like that and we can really get that edge finished nicely. Then if you've got some little extra spaces that you're thinking, I can't get that with the scissors, then that's when you attack it with the sandpaper. Really depends on what you're using as to how easy or hard that's going to be, you can try sanding block, but I really find it easiest if you'd use a dremel with the ascending bid on the top of it. You need to have a couple of bits extra handy, and all you're going to do is turn that on and my battery is almost dead, so hopefully, we keep going before I have to charge it. But just turn it on a low setting, and then very carefully come back and fix any edges that you need to fix by sending them. If you're doing a new coat of resin, after the sandpaper, it will just cover up whatever you just did perfectly. Let me turn this one off. There we go. It'll just cover up everything in sand and you won't even see that it's been sanded anywhere. So once you get it smoothed out, and all the rough places and the little bits cleaned off, now is when we can decide, are we going to guild the edge or are we going to put a new layer of resin on top of this, or are we going to paint it? Because you can do any of those options, and as long as it's not lipping up really obviously, then that would be okay to go ahead. We can also guild the edge after we add a clear coat on top of these, which I'm almost tempted to do because I don't like the little lip up at the little edge there. I'd rather it be completely domed over and smooth, and then if I were going to do the edges, I would probably do that at that point. On all of these, I'm going to clean up all the edges, and then I'm going to do a layer of clear, and then I might decide, I want a layer clear on all of these to really dome that up nicely. Then I'm going to either paint or guild, or leave it as is. So let me go ahead, and the way I'm going to do that for these pieces, it would really be nice if you had a box top because this stuff is going to spill over the sides. So here's an example of one that I was using, and I've put it in here with palette paper so that I could maybe take it out later. But I do have resin sticking out the side of the box so it might not be able to open. So I might just use it as I have it, but I'm just going to have little cups sitting in here with these sitting on the cups, and I'll make sure that my surface is level, and then this will have room to drip into my box top so that we don't drip all over our table. Now I wish I was more strategic in where I put that cup. Let me say this. While you're dripping over the edge, if you don't want drips on the bottom of your piece, which we absolutely do not want, then we need to tape off the bottom. If I put all six of those in there, that's going to be perfect. But what's going to happen is as it drips over the edge, if I get any spaces where I drip it over, we're going to have drips on the bottom that stay and we don't want that, so we're going to have to figure out how we're going to prevent that. I'm going to tell you how that is, we're going to use our Frogtape, which is that green painter's tape. The reason why we use it is because it's a little bit stronger than the blue painter's tape. After we've let this on here for say, 6-8 hours, then it's no longer liquidy, so it's not going to run when we go to move it a little bit or something. So we could at least pick it up, not by the top. It's very careful you'd have to pick it up from the bottom and then peel the tape off. Because you want to peel the tape off well before you get to the 24-hour stage. You want to do this really anywhere from like say, eight hours or so. Because otherwise, this tape is going to become basically permanent underneath that resin. Whereas if we tape it off, and then take our little x-acto knife and just trim this round to the size of our piece here. I'm just using a regular x-acto knife. But I'm going to go ahead and pass this down pretty good all around, and we could even probably use the scissors at this point too. The goal is just to trim the tape right up to the very edge of our resin piece at the bottom. Yeah, it works pretty good right there. Then we're going to take our finger and really smooth that down. Then once we've poured the resin and let it sit for say seven or eight hours, really no longer than that, we're going to come back and peel the tape very carefully off the bottom so that, you don't want to touch the top of it and put a fingerprint in it, but you want to peel the bottom off before it gets where you can't do it. I peeled a tiny bit more than I intended, so just trying to cut the tape enough to stick right there. Then when we go to peel this tape off, I will show you how we're going to do that too. Because if it's difficult, we can hit it with a heat gun, and that will soften everything up, enough for us to get that resin to release. So I'm going to go ahead and get all of these prepped here with the sides and the bottom, and I'll be back to show you how we peel that tape, and then we'll take a look at how that finishes off once these have cured overnight. So I will see you back in class and that's basically once you get it all nice and trimmed up how you want it, just stick that down really good. Then we won't have any drips remain on the bottom, so they'll sit flat or they'll sit in the window and be pretty and that's how we do that. Real quick before I'm done taping, let me show you the easiest way besides those scissors is to cut the tape. Just because I was doing it, I thought I'd just show you. I'm actually setting these up on my tape spoolers so it's up off my table, so that I can just hold it now and run the knife around the edges. Then anywhere where I've missed the edge, I can go back and trim it up. But this really makes this process quite a bit faster for doing this little edges here. Then anywhere where I've got a piece of tape there that I don't want that little lip or whatever I've created accidentally, I can just go back and then trim that little piece off. Then I've got a nice edge that I've created. It just makes it easier sitting up on our tape thing. I just thought I would share that. If you're having trouble trimming your tape, this is the easiest way that I've found to trim it off my edges while I'm doing the backside. I'll be back in a bit. So I have all of our pieces sitting up on our cups. I don't have these attached with anything, but you could take a little bit of tape and roll it up and stick it on the cup and stick it down if you want to make sure these don't move, and I think we're going to be fine. So I've mixed up my resin and it's been mixing now for three minutes. So I'm going to go ahead and very carefully start to pour some of this on here. If you need to use a spreader, like if you're using a calculator and you're getting really exact with the amount of resin that you're pouring on top of your pieces and you need to spread it out, then you need to use a silicone spreader. Because the silicone is what's going to let you spread it out, and then you can set the spreader to the side. Did that one pretty first. Then when that resin dries, it will peel right off of that spreader. So if you're trying to do this and not drip over at all, if you'll put it on like this and take a spreader and maybe spread it to the edges, then you will have an easier time at not going over and a little more exact there. I have a bunch of different types of spreaders, let me find one. This is an art spreader. But if I spread that with this and then I like where it's at, I can just let that silicone dry on that spreader, and it will come off later. Just peels right off, just like it did off our paper. So if you have a space where it's not filling in, you could spread it over to that space. One thing I might do before I go any further right here is I didn't make sure my board was level. So let me level it real quick so that I make sure that when I pour a little bit more of this on here, we don't have an issue, so it's leveled this way. It's mostly level this way. Wrong way. I should've known that I had to prop up this side yesterday. So let's see. I'm just putting the sticks under the board here. Well, that's made it way unlevel. Let's try again. There we go. That's nice and level. This side is nice and level and I'm leveling the actual piece that my box is sitting on to make sure that we don't end up leveling the wrong thing. Now, these have settled out to the end. I might just put a little bit more. I want these to really not have a lip on the top at all. I want them to smooth right over the side. Once you've got it done then we can use our torch or heat gun and get rid of our bubbles. So I might just use the heat gun for the moment. Well, I can use the torch. Let's just use the torch and I'll put some butane in it. So the torch is so easy to use. You just put this on the bottom. Do it nice and tight, usually straight up, not to the side. Sorry about that. Just a couple of seconds. You can fill the container, get cold so, and it don't really hold that much gas. Then basically, we hold the button down, and then hold this down, and that lights and we have our little flame there. This works because it's super-fast. You just want to keep moving right over. Pop those bubbles. I will say you can put resin straight on top of resin just like we did. If you touch the top when you are putting the tape on and stuff, then if you'll just take a little bit of alcohol and rub the top with the alcohol and like a shammy cloth or a shop towel, something that doesn't have any fibers on it. If you'll wipe any fingerprints or finger oil that you might have put on the top. If you'll wipe those off, real quick before you go with your second layer of resin, that resin will stick just fine. You don't have to stay in the top. Because if you go to @resin website, it tells you in-between coats to send the top of it. But you don't really need to do that if you'll go ahead and just a little bit of alcohol on top only where you might have touched and then do your next layer of resin, you're good to go. This is now nice and covered. We're dripping over the edges. I'm just double-checking that everything is thick enough that it's dripping because I want to drip over the edges and cover some of that sanding that I did. You can take your finger too and spread it on the edge if it's not getting exactly where you want to get it. Then if you put more resin on there like I'm doing to get it to really spill over. We can just touch it and come around the edge too if we want to really make sure that we're getting anywhere that we sanded. Or if we're going to gild the edge, it doesn't really matter. But if you're not going to gild the edge, then this is the way to really make sure. Because remember our edges are not straight. They're like the side of a rock. They're crooked. So anywhere on the edge that we sanded, that's going to show if we don't just go through and make sure there's a little tiny bit of resin touching it. So just making sure I got all the edges because remember, we got 45 minutes to work with this. I just want to make sure I hit any spot I sanded so it's now shiny again. If you get it all dry and you think, well, there's a spot I need more resin on, you can mix up a tiny bit of resin and just rub it on that spot and let that dry again overnight. There are solutions to some of the issues that you might encounter. Now I got stuff all over my gloves. Let me go ahead and switch out my gloves. Or if I don't plan to touch it again, I might just torch it one more time, so just get our little flame. This is the most satisfying part, is watching the little bubbles pop. I'm keeping it moving so that I'm not sitting in one spot for too long. Then I'm making sure that I get all the bubbles popped and I'm not burning my resin because I'm keeping it moving. See, you just pick your finger off of that and your flame stops. I really like that so much nicer than my really big one. So now we're going to just have to let this sit and let that dry. We're going to come back in seven or eight hours and peel the tape off of the back. If you want to make it even easier for yourself, you could use a wood stick or wood skewer, and come back in about 15 minutes or so when you think you've got enough drip that stripped off of it and we can wipe some of these drips off the bottom. But we don't have to. But you can suggest another little option there. We're going to let these dry and I'll be back. So let's take the tape off of one of our pieces so we can talk about if you have any trouble because this one has been sitting for about 7.5 hours because now it's late in the evening and I don't want to forget to come back up here. It's not tacky anymore. So it could probably still take a fingerprint because really, 8-9 hours is probably better to wait, but we're about 7. 5 hours. So at this point, it's still super pliable. It's just to the point that it's no longer tacky. So if I touch it, I'm not leaving a fingerprint and it's not sticking to my finger. I want to be super careful especially on these flat pieces not to touch the top, but hold it by the sides. I'm going to take the tape off. If I run into a place where I just can't get the tape off, I can heat that with my heat gun heat it just a little bit and that will allow me to get that tape off of an area where it's not wanting to come off. I'm going to be very careful. I may grab one of my Exacto knives and just see if I can get this tape started. Because my fingernails aren't now let me grab it really easy. I'm just getting it to lift. Then did you see how easy that just came off? You've got some resin right here. But if we just very slowly pull, we are pulling off any resin that is sitting on the bottom. Now if I have a little piece that gets stuck like that, I can just come back with my knife and just get that right up under there and pull that back off. It may have been the very tiny edge that I was trying to cover with a second piece of tape. So it might've just embedded itself. Look, it just came right off. There we go. So very carefully, I'm just going to finish pulling this off of the back. Then I'm going to set this back over there, on its little pedestal to finish drawing, I just needed to make sure that I didn't let this sit all night because once we get past this little still pliable stage, it's almost impossible to get that tape off and you want to do it. Once it's cured enough that you're not messing it up by touching it, but not so cured that that is a permanent bond on there. Then we've got plenty of where we can see that we've pulled our little bubbles off there. So that is how we're going to get a nice clean finish, and look how beautiful the edges are now. It looks like the choppy little edge of our geode, so it's not perfect, it's not supposed to be, but our geode is not perfect, so we're mimicking that. Now we can come back tomorrow and decide if we want a gold leaf that which is really popular, or if we want to paint it, or if we want to leave it just like that. I think some of these will be really beautiful as sun catcher is hanging in the windows. So I might see what I can do about that. Well, once the resin is completely dry, you can drill into it too if you need to, but I don't think that's what I'm going to do. I might find something I can glue to the back and put a chain on it, maybe hanging it on a suction cup in the window. Then I'd be able to see how much light can come through here. So I think that's going to be my plan on some of these really pretty pieces. That's how we take the tape off. You want to do that at about the eight-hour mark. You want it to be not sticky to the touch. Then while you're taking the tape off, just be real careful that you're not pressing down on that side that you're holding it from the sides if he can. Let's talk about different ways that we could finish the edges of our pieces. So one way, obviously, is just to leave the edge just like it is. If you like the edge to be the raw surface that we get when we pull that out of the silicone mold after you cut off any sharp, jagged edges and then maybe pour your last layer of clear on top. If you like the edge just like it is, then leave it that way. There's some other options that we have though, which gives a little bit more finished look. I'm just going to tell you a couple of those that I've tried here on my sample pieces. That's why I love the sample pieces because now is the time to figure out what you want to do on a great big piece. Because let me tell you, some of these are a little easier than others. If you find that out on a little piece that there's one that's going to work out better for you, that's good news. So the piece that I didn't love, which I could've saved it. I could have gone ahead and put another layer of resin on top, just like we do in later projects. But I didn't really mind. It was a good piece to experiment with and see that some pieces don't always come out. But in later projects, you'll see on the layers that I didn't like as I add another layer, turns into something that I love. So it's a good lesson to learn. On this one, I just painted the edges and I just painted it with a craft paint. You can paint it, which isn't acrylic paint. You can paint it with any acrylic paint and that's fine. I just used a small paintbrush to come along the edges and paint that just like that. That dries really nicely and it's not going to chip off. That's one way you can finish it. If you finish it with a paint, that's a really nice way to mimic the sigh of a rock. So that's why I did like that. Painted in a color that was similar to the rock that we have here that we were using as our inspiration piece. Another thing that we can do to finish these off is to do gold leaf and gold leaf is so pretty. You'll see most of the commercial little resin pieces like where you can buy some coasters that are done in this geode look or even like the real piece of stone that they've cut. To say like a coaster or something, they're finished in gold leaf. This is a really popular finish, an edge finish on these. But it is a little bit harder to get a really good solid coat. To do the gold leaf, you're going to need some gold leaf sheets. I've been using the Martha Stewart ones because I have a whole bunch of these that I've apparently bought over the years when I forgot I had some, so I think I've three packages of the gilding sheets all in one color too, how funny. But you can get these in four different colors. They come in copper, gold, silver, and one that is a metallic stripe look. There's like 12 sheets in here and in one of these, two of these sheets is what I ended up getting into. There are still a little bit of gold left on those sheets, but it did take like two and I really could go back again and fill in some of the spaces that I left unfilled in. So you need the guilt sheets. I do have some gilding brushes, which are really soft brushes that help you push the gold into the different areas. I also found that when I was working with this I wanted a stiffer paintbrush also. So I also just used a little bit bigger, stiffer paintbrush to help me really jab that down into some of these crevices. I did find that I needed that. Then, of course, you need some gilding glue. You're basically going to paint the glue on the sides and you're going to let it get a little bit dry so that's tacky. When it's tacky, it will then grab that gold. Then you'll take your little gilding brushes and just guide that gold where you want it and then you're set. This takes a little bit of patience and you're just going to need to treat it as a project that maybe like meditation almost to get all those crevices filled in. If you've got a smooth edge, like we've got on these little ones that I made in the little pre-made mold, that guilding will go right on super fast and easy with no problem. But with these jagged edges that we created, those are going to take a little bit of effort to get that gilding down in there, so just be aware. But it does give the really prettiest finish. Another thing that I've experimented with on these others, and then I just got lazy and did it to all of them is some gold wax. I actually have several gold wax. I have this ribbon buff, which is super easy to work with. You just take the lid off and then it comes right out and it's a wax there. You're just going to take a brush, find a brush here, and just dip it into the tip here, and you'll get some on your brush. Then you just paint that onto your surface. That is super easy and fast and gets in all the crevices. Then when you let that dry, you're just going to take a soft cloth and you can now polish that and it will shine. This comes in a bunch of different colors. Then you clean your brush with a brush cleaner like turpentine. So I work with oil paint quite a bit, so I have a little tub of brush cleaner, so I just clean the tip off in that tub of brush cleaner. That's what that looks like. It's really pretty also, I will point out that this is called the gold leaf color. It is nowhere near as bright as the real gold leaf. So just be aware of that if you go the route of the ribbon buff, wax, it's not going to be this bright gold, like you would expect. It's more of an antique gold. You just paint it on, you let it dry and you just take a soft cloth and you buff it, and that finished those edges. I ended up liking how easy that was to do that I just went ahead and painted it on the other ones because it was super speedy. I got that at the art store, so I'm sure you can get these at the art store or online, and I liked that way. Now you could also just go for some gold paint. Gold acrylic paint, they have metallic acrylic paint. You could get that. I just didn't have any here in my art room, which surprises me because I seem to have a little bit of everything but a metallic colored. I probably do have some metallic Martha Stewart paints. So I could have done that. Then that would have been the cheap and easy way and those covers so nicely, so a couple of options there. Another thing that I have is metallic waxes. I love the metallic waxes. Let me get one open. You just dip a cloth in them and then run that along the edge of your piece. This would be really good for the sides of the ones that we do on my cradle board because we could finish the sides of the cradle board with a wax coat. It's one of my favorite ways to finish the sides of a cradle board when it comes around the side. I'll probably finish one of those pieces and maybe a wax possibly. So that was another fun option. It's just all in what you have handy and what look you're going for on these pieces. One of the easiest way it was using acrylic paint and you can use the any of the acrylic paints. It'll stick to the sides just as easy as this one did. So you want to definitely experiment with how you finish your side while you're doing these little pieces and just see what is it that you love, how easy or how hard was it. When you translate that to a big project, is it going to be something that you can manage or not? So I will see you back in class. I hope you enjoyed the little piece projects and I can't wait to jump into the bigger pieces with you. 9. Medium Geodes: Check it out. I've got our two larger pieces here, and I made one with the hole and one without the hole when we were making our molds. That way we can get an idea of what that would look like if we actually had a hole in the center of our geode, which is quite common actually, when you get a real geode. So I'm going to definitely do one in the colors that were so pretty with the maroon and the yellow. I liked it with the pearl powder that was iridescent and the glitter. So I've got those out. Then I've also got some of these little perfect pearls, because these are iridescent powders too, and they come in like a little pack of several colors. So you don't have to have a big pearlescent one if you want to get a little six-pack of different colors to try out. Because remember, we only use a little tiny bit of the pearl powder when we use it. It's not like we're using it all when we use it. So that's another choice. When I decided to do on one of these is take my real geode as inspiration for the second piece rather than use the colors that I did in my test pieces. Really, if I were you, I would do lots of rounds of test pieces and start to learn. Make sure I don't have resin that's going to stay forever on my pretty board. If I were you, I would do several rounds of the test pieces and really get a lock on what colors you love for some bigger pieces. But for this one, I'm going to take this geode as my inspiration for color and it has blue. Then it has a naturally earth tone under here. Then some lighter rock-looking pieces, which could be our glass and some blue in the middle with the blue ring and a blue ring around the outside. So I'm going to go use this for our inspiration. I've got high-flow acrylics here, which is fine, because again, it's still acrylic and I've got quinacridone, nickel, azo gold, just hoping that's going to be the right color here. The fallow blue because that's the pretty deep blue that I have. I also have a lighter blue and it's just a matte acrylic paint. This is not the cheap craft paint. This is actually the acrylic paint which has more pigment than craft paint that I got at the Blickstore. I also have these perfect pearls out. I'm thinking that I could perhaps add some of this iridescent maybe in with a fallow or as a layer by itself for that natural color in there. That's like a coppery tone, which is really pretty and different than the gold that we were using. So I'm definitely going to use one of those. If you've got random art supplies, like I do, go through some of these random supplies and just see, hey, can I use that? Or what have you? I've got a bunch of cups here. I might have to get out another thing of my stir sticks because I'm running low there. I'm not sure where I put them, so we use the shorter stir stick . Here they are. These come in packs of 100. There's the woodcraft sticks on those two. Then I got out one little package of 50 and I had put the other 50 away and now I don't see where I put the other 50. So we'll just open up this pack to make sure I got enough of these little stir rods, what ready when I need them. So I actually had about an inch of the clear leftover from a minute ago. I'm going to use that first because that's definitely reaching its 45-minute time limit. We can put the paint in on top if we want or we can put it in first. It doesn't matter. So I'm just going to go and fill up as many cups as I need here. I'm putting a little bit more in there than I was about maybe an inch and a half of liquid there. I want a cup for every color, so, let's go ahead and set a cup up here for every color. Because this is a bigger piece. I just want to make sure I got enough. I can always mix more, but it's fun when you're pouring to just go ahead and get busy. I was over generous in all my other little cups, so I might just pull a little bit out of my cups just to make sure I can make my last color here. I'm just taking a tiny bit out of each one because apparently I was still happy and I don't want to mix up anymore. I might not need it. I don't want to be wasteful. I don't have to be. Then I do have my little silicone mold still sitting over here. So if I get these poured and I've got extra, I do have the little molds I can still fill up. So I think I got 1, 2, 3, 4, I think I've got enough out. Let's just go ahead and start mixing our colors. Look at that. Actually, I could have put that in with that one, but let's just see what the difference of this paralyzed one is versus the paint one. That's going to be very interesting. Look at that shimmer in that, my goodness. I do like these to shimmer, so I liked the little pearly ones, but if you want some colors that don't shimmer, totally up to you. I put glitter in the ones over there, but we can do it without the glitter too. My goodness, that's a color. So what can you do with these, once you make them? There's quite a bit you can do. You can put these in little plate racks and I got a couple of little plate racks at the Michaels. These just sit right on there. Then you can have it sitting, say, in a window, perhaps. That's a crazy bright color. Let the sun shine through them. That'd be really pretty. That's a crazy color. We'll see. You could also do make little gifts out of these. Lot of people are doing tabletops out of these beautiful geode pieces. So that's always an option as you can make the bigger one into some type of standard tabletop or maybe a pretty cake stand, that'd be a real pretty cake stand in your kitchen. If the top of it were that pretty geode piece. There's just lots of things. You could frame them if you do the bigger canvas pieces. I'm going to do a canvas piece to show you how that differs. Helps if you open your paint before you try to pour it in and then make a big mess. There we go. Now, that's a petty color. That might be my favorite color. Look how pretty that is. It's just going to take some practice on how much, how transparent, or non-transparent. Look at this glitter, it's kind of more charcoal. Let's just for some of this glitter in here. That's pretty. I'm going to put some glitter in this one too. Maybe this is the same tone as these paints we're using. Maybe I will add some of that glitter into this blue. That's pretty, and we'll add that into this also. It's Nickel Azo. What color was that? Nickel Azo gold, was that what we used? I don't know. Here we go. Yeah, Nickel Azo gold, that's a crazy color. You can also mix colors. Don't be afraid if you want to come up with some beautiful custom color, don't be afraid to do that. You're welcome to definitely mix custom colors. I've been keeping it out of the bottle for simplicity sake. For this class, which to start with, if you're not comfortable mixing colors, that's the thing to do. But I'm going to put some glitter in this one too. Let's try this one in here. This coppery color in that red might be pretty. After you've been doing this for a bit, if you want to really experiment and have some beautiful customized colors, then definitely do that. I'm mixing glitter in, but that's not quite what I meant. Let's just go ahead with those yummy coppery glitter again. Just stuck my arm on that, definitely on my container where I started mixing. Now I got a big circle of glue on my arm. So this is definitely messy. Wear an apron. Don't wear your favorite top or jeans. You'll definitely have resin all over you by the time you're done. Cover your surface that you don't want to get stuff all over, cover it up. I got one left. Maybe I'll do this more solid gold and see. This is the yellow oxide again. Because it is a different color than that other one, it gives a different look. We could put some of those polarized powder into this too and just see. Rather than the glitter, we could polarize a color. I like the little powders, they're good for tons of stuff. I put a weird shimmer into our gold. I like that. Now, this is the one that I mixed from the other batch from doing the little ones, so it's thicker. I can feel it, but it's still workable, but it is thicker than these. It's probably been mixed for like 40 or 45 minutes. So even though it's not completely done in that real thick container, it is a lot thicker than it was. I'm going to have some glass handy. I think I want the mirrors in here, but I've got some other things at the bottom. I'm going to pour the mirrors back in there. Because my blue inspiration piece has a whole level here of the rock, so I want to use that rock and I'm going to go for the pretty champagne color. If you only get one color of these rock when you're purchasing, I do recommend a neutrally rock, do a neutrally champagne kind of color. I think I'm going to put the rock on at the end on this one. I'm going to put some rock on here at the beginning of this one. I don't like the great big pieces, so there are some big pieces in here that I will take out. Even if you don't completely see the rock on top once we get all the resin on it, it will still create some dimension throughout the piece so that when the sun shines through it, you can see it. Another thing, too, if we do this on the outside, for instance, I'm doing this on the outside, you don't have to read the whole thing. You could do like parts of it. What if we just did a part here? Got that in there. Then maybe a little part up here. That's it or something. Now I will say that I wish I had some clear or enough clear to start. Let's just see if we have enough clear left in here to start these off. You can put a color on top of the stones too, but I've done that and I want to see the stones. If you do the clear on the stones, you can see the natural shimmer of the stone itself, whereas if you put a color on top, you're coloring it all. Now these pieces, they're definitely getting more than one layer. I'm putting the first layer on today and we'll be putting the next layer on tomorrow. So if I don't get all the rocks covered with some clear, that's okay. The reason why we do more than one layer, especially on these larger pieces, is it really adds depth and dimension and it's so beautiful. Gives you a chance to enhance or change anything that you might have done that you didn't love. These are definitely going to be multilayered pieces. Generally, we want to go from the outside in. But because I liked the pink so much on the inside of the test piece, I'm going to start right there and then come back and ring this with the gold. Now, this is getting really thick and it's warm because this stuff gets warm as it gets thicker and thicker. We can always come back. I'd actually going to put some of this on top of the stones. Because remember, we can always come back and add more stones on top. Depending on how thick we put this first layer, we may not have enough height on our little sidewalls to put a second layer. So we have to keep that in mind if we plan on adding any tomorrow. Do I even have room to do that? Because I've filled this to the point that I have, I don't think I'm going to have any room tomorrow to add to this. So I'm actually going to do to it what I plan on doing to it now because I didn't leave any room for another layer. Just going to pop a couple of the gold in here so I can run my heat gun around. I'll be super careful and not have multiple drops. So let's do the heat gun. This might be a one layer piece. Now, that is really pretty and that might be done. Another thing that we can do tomorrow if I don't do another layer of any color because I'm really loving that right there. Sometimes you just have to know when to stop is we can come back with our posca pens and add some geode lines and then code it in the clear to seal everything in. So plans change and we'll let that one change and run this one a little more. I like splitting that gold up some. I wish that this would stay separated because look at that. I hope that stays like that. Let's move on to this one. If I do a better job of not filling it up then we'll add a second layer tomorrow. This one has this naturally color and then the blue and then some type of pretty clear with maybe stone in it and then blue in the middle. We could actually do blue rock. This was a perfect reason why you need to have some clear leftover. Because I'd need some clear to, if I want the blue stone maybe, I'd want clear for that. All right, so I went ahead and mixed up a little bit of clear because I was wanting the clear. I'm thinking because of the way our geode has a color and then a clear and then a color, what if we have two different colors of stones just starting out our center piece before we go into all the different colors there. Maybe we have a little bit of blue and a little bit of our champagne color. Really, we could even put in a third blue color if we want but it's introducing more of a green and I want to keep it more in the colors that I've mixed over here. I have enough of this stuff leftover that I'm definitely going to have to use that on some little silicone molds maybe just to use that up instead of wasting it. Let's go ahead and get these on here and get this one poured then we'll worry about the leftover. So I'm actually going to work my way up to the stones and then put clear on the stones and see what we get because look how pretty that is. So our inspiration piece is here. See if I can set it works at least in view. There we go. That there. Now we're ready. So I'm going to start from the outside and just pour my way in towards the middle. I could put stones on the outside too but I think I'm going to leave them on the inside here. I've not left myself enough room to move my hand here, let's just move these over for a second. These two colors are very similar but they do give off a different shimmer. I do like that variation on the shimmer. Here let's go for the dark. Let's go for the lighter, let's work our dark in. Oh my gosh, this is the most pretty color. I'm going to really careful just do some rings around here just because. Might not, should've put that blew out there but now I've done it so we're committed. This is just clear. I want to pour the clear on the middle. I didn't want to have any color there. We may be adding to that but let's get our heat gun and move some of that around a little and see what we got. So on this one, I've actually left enough room in there to do another layer tomorrow. So I think I'm going to let that dry and we're going to work it a little bit more tomorrow so that I can shift those colors a little bit. I don't 100 percent love the way the colors are on there. I might want way more of this blue. I'm going to stop and let that one dry because I have left plenty of room to add another layer and I want to experiment with the adding of the extra layer so you can see what that does for us. I don't know if we want to use some of these colors in our larger piece because I have so many colors here. So I might actually want to experiment on a larger piece with some of these exact same colors because I still have so much mixed up that I don't want to waste it. So I think I will pull the big piece over and we'll do a layer on there using maybe not all but some of these colors since I mixed up so much. Then we'll come back and lay a second layer on this one tomorrow. So I'll be back. 10. Medium Geodes finishing up: So I've left these dry overnight, and I think what we have seen from the smaller pieces that we've done is that they need to be a little bit fuller, and because I planned on two layers for these bigger pieces, that was perfect. I don't think I planned on adding anymore did this, but it is sitting below our wall, so I think I could actually add a little more to that, give it a little more depth, and then just see what we end up with. We may hate it, but I may like it. So I've got some extra stones here, in case I want to pour those in, I've mixed a little bit of my colors that I want to use here up top, and I don't love the yellow that turned into green here. So today, I have mixed the phthalo blue with this pretty blue, and I've used a perfect petals, iridescent powder and that's the three colors that I've put out over here, and then over here I've put out yellow, pink, and another iridescent powder in more of the white color rather than the gold. I'm just going to start layering these in, and we've got about 45 minutes because I just finished mixing this, and just going to experiment and see what we get. I think for this one, and I'm actually going to change the colors up a tiny bit, and we're going to lay blue on the outside and just go from there. Move some of these out of my way since I'm running into them. Now, we could lay this on with our stick, if we wanted to. I could go a little bit slower, and lay this one in with the stick. I may have to mix up more, I was trying not to mix up nearly as much as I did yesterday, so I may have under-mixed, so we'll see. Let's just start with that and maybe I'll do a blue ring around here towards the center. I'm trying to keep my little wood stick on the paper here so that anything that drips off of it drips onto my palette paper and not onto my table or my board. I should've had some clear that I mixed too, but that's okay, we're going to just layer these in and see what would get. I'm trying to keep the paint still transparent, I may have been successful and I may not, but we're just adding over on top of the layers that we already had. Then also, thing that we saw from the smaller pieces that we would definitely need to do a clear coat on top of these when we pull them out or I'm old, so I'm already planning on that. I'm just going to continue doing a little bit of layering and then hit it with my heat gun and see what we can get the colors to do. I put a little bit of glitter in here with these colors also, so it's not just solid tolerance like glittery color. So if we wanted to be more exactly where we're laying this, I can pull my stick out and be a little more careful. So I think I'm going to hit this with a heat gun and see what we get. I'm going to pick up a paper towel so I don't get this sticky stuff all over my gun like I did yesterday. I want to just move this stuff. Well, actually, I may want to put a bit of golden there real quick before I do that. So we really start running things around, and then I may put a few more of our rocks right on the top there. We might add more gold, but let's be a little more sparing today since we already know what happens when we put too much on there. Now we can see, I don't know if you can see this on camera, but we have a little bit of green coming up from the underneath. Oh my goodness, it is so beautiful, and I can see some little rings here that I just poured in there that blended real beautifully. That is turning out really pretty. So I think what I'm going to do is hook a few more of these pretty rocks here in the center. I'll make sure I don't have any gigantic pieces, I don't want that piece falling right there in the middle of it, because I want some of this sparkle to come through on the top. There's a big long piece, I don't really want that up there. Then anything that doesn't have resin on it will separate off tomorrow. When we put the clear on top of it that will really cement that in, but that isn't looking so much prettier than it was yesterday, and you can really tell there is some depth in there to that color. So I love the two layers on that. Oh my goodness, that is so pretty. Super happy with the colors right now. So let's come back over here, I'm going to add some more color into here, and I've actually made these a little bit thinner today so that hopefully there'll be more transparent. So as I'm layering on top of what I've already got going on there, hopefully, we will just see the more depth that we've added. This is just that pearl powder. That's pretty. So I'm going to go ahead, I've noticed that if I put this gold near the center it all heads toward the center. I might hit that again in a moment. So let's try if I hit this on this outer ring if I can keep the gold further out from the center. Let's hit this with the heat gun. That does look like it is further out, I'm being real careful because I don't want to knock any of this over the wall there. So the further you put it out, it does look like it stays further out. So keep that in mind, if you put it close to the center, and you're really wanted it towards the outside edge, putting it close to the center is not going to push out and stay out for us. At this point too, I may put a few more crystals on this one and then I'll be ready to set it to the side and let that dry overnight again. Hang on. Apparently, I put those big pieces right back in there not even thinking. Look how pretty that is. Oh, my goodness. This one might be pretty if I put the gold on the outside edge too. So I think just so that it doesn't look so strange that there's only gold right there in the center, I'm going to come work a little gold on this outside edge. I hope that broke it up a little bit better. I can see that when you push that, that's how we're getting our lip at the end. So pour in that. We're definitely going to have a clear layer on top of these after we pull it out of our mold and clean up the little jagged edges. The longer you spend on your mold and the more prep you do before you start, the better your pieces will end up when you're done. So just keep that in mind even though it's a pain in the butt to do all the prep work, it really does significantly make the difference with your final piece. So now we're going to have to let these sit overnight again and let them cure up for another day. Then I can put the clear on top of there like we did on our smaller pieces. Actually, super duper psyched about how pretty these are looking because this is so much prettier now than it started out. I can see some real depth, then I can see a little bit of some colors shining through. There's some wispy colors in here that is just so beautiful. This is the piece that was inspired by our little rock and it doesn't look 100 percent like it. But man, it sure does look like a really nice piece that we got from our inspiration piece. This, I just love the colors. I'm now a definite fan of this really pink. What color is this? This is quinacridone magenta and this is yellow orange azo. So in case you were interested in using those two colors, that's what we've got there. So I'm going to go ahead and set these in my photography tint and let these dry overnight, and I will be back tomorrow. So here we've got our little two-piece project that we've come back to. Things are completely dry. This one, I actually love it so much that we're going to just take that one out and we're going to do a layer of clear on top maybe, but this one's ready to pull out of our mold. Just real careful as I'm pulling the sides down so that we clear it. Let's see what we got. I put some paper on the backside just because it had the silicone left here in the center, but look how easy that is to come off. We'll just pull it out from the middle here. Look how pretty that is. Oh, my goodness. That's really pretty. Now I can imagine they are sitting on little plate stand in my window or hanging as a sun catcher in the window. I can't wait to see what we can do with that. So the edges are pretty not too bad. So again, what I'm going to do is clean the edges up with my heavy-duty kitchen scissors. I have a couple of these just from our art room. They're just heavy-duty scissors, they are not just regular scissors. I'm going to go through and just trim off any of the weird spiky pieces that are left. Then I'm going to set these into one of my little pans and we're going to do a layer clear on top of that and that'll really smooth out any ledges that we have on the top and it'll come down the sides of anything I cut off and give us a nice edge. Then we can decide from there, how we want to finish that edge any further, if we want to finish it with some guilt, which I really like and so I may do that. So we're going to call this piece, at this stage, we're not going to add any more color. I'm going to do a clear layer on top of it. I'll be back tomorrow to show you what this one looks like with a clear on it before we do anything else to it. This is another silicone one I did in the round mold of the leftover silicone from yesterday. Look how pretty that is. That is definitely a little coaster favorite. I was more careful not to blow the stuff up the side with my heat gun, so I have less little edges here to clean up, but that's really pretty. So these are some really pretty little pieces and I'm cleaning it out because then if I have any extra leftover today, I'll have it ready. This piece is the one that I love, but I want to add one more layer. So let's just go ahead and I'm going to use the blue and the teal that I like so much, the blue teal, the paint. This is what I like about doing the small pieces. You really get a feel and then we got a little tiny bit of brown, so I'm going to use that. You really get a feel for what you like and what you don't like and then you start to make some pieces in that until you gravitate towards another colorway. I just love that because when I started out the workshop, I didn't have a clear idea of what colors I was going to end up using on these bigger pieces. The further we've gone here with the pieces that we've done, the more I really gravitated to this beautiful blue. The blue is not as transparent but this beautiful one that I've only used that alcohol ink, it is very transparent. So we're going to see coming through that layer, the layer underneath it, which is exactly what I wanted. I'm going to heat this with the heat gun and then I'll be real careful not to overfill this. But I do love this transparent one. I may put a few more stones back on this layer too, so we'll see. Heat gun. So this one actually has a lot of transparency in it. You can really see those under layers coming through. I don't know in the end if it'll be my favorite, but it is very interesting. Then you can see I actually breached my mold here. I blew some out. You have to be real careful when you're right at the top of your mold and you're still doing your heat gun or something that you're not running it outside your mold. That's just the spot when we pull it out of the mold that we'll trim off. It's not a big deal. This one has the champagne stones and then I think I may just add a few more of those and make this pretty rock part even almost like a tiny bit larger than we already have it. I'm not trying to make it even or anything. I like that it's a little more natural there. But I do like that whole rocky center. This one is ready to sit back over there and just let it dry overnight. We'll take the mold off and put a clear layer on it, maybe tomorrow to finish it off. So this one's got to dry again overnight. So I'll be back. So now we're back and I have put the extra layer of the clear on the top of this one. Man, did that turn out beautiful. Look how pretty that is. I made sure, because the edges were a bit jagged. I made sure that when I was pushing it over the edge that I was just taking my finger and catching any of the rough edges that we had on here, and then I still have a few rough edges left. So I've got my heavy-duty scissors and these are like not regular scissors. These are heavier duty than that. You could do this with your kitchen shears too because, man, those things cut anything. There's still a few rough edges because when I was pouring, I guess, I just got over-excited to just get right to it. So I left a few edges rougher than I really intended. So if you end up doing that, go ahead and take your kitchen shears and trim them off, and then you are ready to finish the side with any of the side finishing methods that I showed you at the end of the little sampler videos, the sampler project, Project 1. So I personally love the gilding. So I'm just going to show you on this one because I actually recorded a whole video on painting the sides, and then, when I got around to editing the video, there was no sound, so I was like, oops. So we're going to paint the side of this real quick just to show you how you might finish it off. I've just got a little B paintbrush here. You clean this rubbing buff gold leaf wax with turpentine. So the same thing that you might clean your brushes with if you're painting with oil paint. So basically, I just push a little in lid and get that on my paintbrush. Then very carefully, I start just painting the edges. So what I like about this stuff is you can do more than one layer if you need to, and you can get it down into the grooves if you've got a whole bunch of deep grooves. Fun stuff. Then once this is dry, we can go back over it with a cloth and really buff that up if we need to. If you went back and you trimmed any other edges that were sharp, this would cover anything else that you did. You wouldn't have to do another clear layer on top of that if you didn't want to. But if you are leaving the edges raw, and you had any super sharp edges, then you might mix up just a tiny bit of resin. With your finger, just put some resin on the spot that you trimmed if you need to shine it back up and you let that dry overnight. Then that will fix anything that you had left that needed to be shined back up with the resin. So basically, you just paint that on just like that and we let that dry. Then we're ready to do whatever it is that we're going to do with this. So that is how I'm going to finish the edge of this because we were already with the pretty gold on here. Now I will say if you get this all over your fingers like I do, don't be touching the top of this because you'll end up with gold fingerprints on top of there. But look how beautiful that is. If you've finished the edge, we'll be all set. Then this stuff comes in lots of different colors, but you can finish it with paint if you want. Like I was telling you in the last video, you can use acrylic paint. I finished some of these with the Martha Stewart craft paint because I liked the colors, and it works very well. But you could also use a higher-quality acrylic paint if you wanted to finish the edge with those. If you had a color that you wanted to pull out or something, you could finish it with an acrylic paint because the craft paints are acrylic paint and they stick just fine. Or you can leave it raw, your choice there. But that's all. I'm going to finish this one here in just a bit. So here's the other piece that we added another layer to last night, and I went ahead and let that dry fully. I do have a little bit or it spilled over our little dam here, so that we're going to have to trim. We'll just see what it looks like if we need a coat of clear or if we are going to finish the edge and that's going to cover it. I don't know, let's just see. Feel like it's going to need a coat of clear. Let me go ahead and pull this one out of my mold. Look and you can see on the side all the different colors that we did, and especially on the back here. So that's really pretty. But I definitely think we're going to have to do a final clear coat. Then this time, I'm going to have to make sure that I go through and trim or sand, any rough edges that I don't want to be on the final piece. Let me see, we'll just trim that right back off just like that, so that we don't get any sharp jagged edges. So you could do that with sandpaper. You can do it with your Dremel. Just go through and very carefully get rid of any spots that you don't want on there. You can trim some of this with an X-Acto knife, but I do find that much harder and not as exact as if you have just some nice heavy scissors, and if it's real thick, it's just hard to do. So once I get it to this stage, I definitely feel like this one is going to have to have another coat of clear so that we really finish it off nicely because I feel like just coming out of it, especially the way it lifts up just a tiny bit, it looks unfinished to me when we do that. Whereas this one, when I did the extra layer of clear, I filled in any of those little lipped areas and it curls over the side really nicely and gives it a nice finished touch. This one still looks a tiny bit unfinished. So we'll definitely do a final layer of clear on top of this and let that dry overnight, and then we'll call this one done. I'll be back. Here's the one that we finished yesterday. I went ahead and just did the edges with that paste wax that I have, the Rub 'n Buff in this gold leaf color because it really is the easiest and makes a nice, pretty finished. I'm going to go back and add a second coat because I let the first coat dry, and then I'm going to call this one good and finished. This is really nice. You can't see through it, but it's nice and translucent. If you hold this up to the window, the light shines really pretty through it. I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out. If you do some of these with a hole in it like I have done on this one, just be really careful not to make that hole too big. Because some of the pieces and the very first one that I ever did, and I showed you the very first one, which doesn't look nearly as nice as they look now. So your very first one might not be as pretty unless you are just lucky and everything turns out beautiful. But the very first one I did, the hole is too big and I just don't love it. You can see here, if we'll make the hole a little bit smaller, we end up with a really pretty result on our piece. So super thrilled with the way that one came out. Then this is the one that we put the last clear coat on for overnight. I really love how you can see the color changes on the side, and the back is just as pretty as the front. This one is not as translucent hanging in the window as the first one, but that's okay. So I think on this one here, I'm actually going to make it a sun catcher. I'm going to show you in another video how I did this. But I've actually just attached some chain on the back here of my smaller pieces so that I can hang these in the window. You can do that with chain. You can do that with ribbon. I'm sure there's plenty of other ways that you can attach things on the back of these to hang them up because they're so pretty with the light coming through them that I hate not to hang them up and enjoy them. This one, I'm definitely going to put a chain on it and hanging that in the window because it's so pretty. This one on the other hand, because it's not so translucent, I may go ahead with one of these plate stands, and I'll have to take the paper off of this. But this one would be really pretty displayed on a shelf because the color is so beautiful and it shines and it's sparkly in the middle. I think I'm going to display this one on my shelf sitting on a little plate rack. So that's a good option for that one. I hope you loved moving from the little pieces where we only did one color layer, to moving to these little bit larger pieces where we then experimented quite a bit more with a couple of layers, and really experimented with putting the crushed glass pieces so that they were a dominant part of the piece. I cannot wait to jump into the larger piece with you in the next project. [MUSIC] 11. Large Geode: So here's the third piece. This is the one that I actually made the mold of while we were chatting. So I think on this one, I'm going to use some of the same colors that we've already got. I might use this. Fine. I think I'm going to stick to everything but the red, and maybe use some of this pretty color. Because this one, I'm definitely going to try to have more than one layer. Hopefully, I've got plenty of room that I've created here on my mold. If we don't 100 percent love the bottom layer of colors, it's not as important as the top layer. So if we don't love what I've ended up doing, that's okay. We can do some more tomorrow. You may even get so creative as to have more than two layers. I'm going to probably stop at the two layers for our class. But the more you do stuff like this, you may want three layers or more depending on how many layers it takes to really hone in on the look you're going for. Just make sure you got enough sidewall height for that if you decide to later add in four or five layers, because when you're doing stuff like tables, which you may be inspired and want to do some old table tops or something, those you could have up to three or four layers in those. I'm just laying out some and I'm not going to lay it on the whole ring around it. I'm just going to be strategic here because why not? These again, just add to the depth and the look that just adds into the depth of a geode, that's real pretty. Do I like that? I'm I good with that there? Let's just go for it. So let me put some gloves back on. I always have gloves going, but after a minute or two, they're full of resin. So easy cleanup, pull the gloves off and put a new pair on. So I have this on a piece of luan on to the really smooth plywood that I had cut to make a backdrop board for the backdrop workshop. This is one piece that I never used and it makes a perfect back for doing a resin piece like this because it's smooth. Then I've put this palette paper up under my actual resin piece. It's not going to create any texture or anything but it's a nice surface that I can then move into my tint. Because I'm going to show you what this looks like in the tint so that you can keep dust off of it. If you're hearing the fans, again, I'm sorry, but I want to keep all the fumes moving throughout the house and probably pulling all the air conditioner outside. So for this first layer, I'm actually going to put clear on the stone. Then I'm going to work from the stone towards the inside of my piece. I didn't want that much clear there. Oh, well. The more you work with it, the more control you end up. I didn't want to do that. You want to be real careful and try not to ledge over your piece. I'm just going to scoop that with my finger because I don't want all that resin to create a bridge. But I'm going to be able to show you what we're going to do with those in a minute anyway. Tomorrow anyway when we go to finish this off, so it's not a big deal. But the last we have on there, the better. So I've got some weird yellows and the blue. So we're just going to go for it. I'm going to work from the outside in. Oh, that's actually really pretty. Really, the name of the game on this piece is to build up the layers. It's not to fill it up the first time for the most points apart. So we're going to be building layers, which really adds to the depth and the interest and the beauty of piece. So I hope you're going to love what these look like when we're done. I want to saddle one of these inside. Because again, I'm trying to use up our resins. Definitely have more than one piece ready to go. So if you end up like we just did with a bunch of extra resin leftover, you can have a scrap piece that you're working on or you can have just a different colorway or something so that, now, this is the one that was mixed the longest. It's actually like caramel. I think I've left that one sit way too long. After about an hour, [LAUGHTER] that really does get so thick, you can't use it. But have a little scrap piece ready so that you can then have a place to put resin and you're not completely wasting a bunch of it. That's a weird color. We're really laying in a bunch of stuff here, aren't we? We're going to lay in this light blue. Again, really this layer is just meant to be a starting layer because we're going to come back with more layers tomorrow. So if you don't 100 percent love what you've done on this layer, it is fixable. My main goal here is just to use all my resin up and then we'll let this dry for tomorrow. I'm not going to mix anymore today. I'm just going to work what I've already got out. This will just be a layer in tomorrow's sit. For geode, I'm just laying rings of color again, because geode is all about rings of colors and layers. Now, I do have the red left, which sucks because that's a lot of red. But I don't really want to do anything with it for this piece, I don't believe. Oh my goodness, I did not mean to do that. That's really pretty though. We'll get that off of there. I don't want it on the outside. Be careful not to do that with your own piece. I might've had this piece moved before I was going to do this, but I was going to show you just how I set this to the side to use up the last bit of resin. You can just pour that right on in there because it's silicone, so it'll just pop right out tomorrow. Set level on pop right out. Look how pretty that is. Now, we don't have to necessarily be done with this piece. Let me see if I can get a little bit of this in here, because I want to have these be pretty too. They don't have to be ugly little pieces that are left. So really, I've only wasted one color and that was from our very first set. So it actually did pretty good on using most of what I mixed up today. I do want to keep my board flat, so if I get anything on my board, I'm just going to wipe it off. Doesn't matter if it's in, I don't care if it blends in. I just don't want it to be a hump on my thing. So actually, I'm going to take my heat gun and run around this and mix some of these colors and pop the bubbles. Because you want to pop the bubbles on every layer. You just want to keep that heat gun moving there to pop the bubbles. You don't want to let it sit too long in one space. Even when we're moving the colors into each other, you want to keep it moving. I can definitely tell there's going to be some reworking tomorrow of color because I'm not loving what I've ended up with here today. Tomorrow, I'll be more strategic with picking colors specifically for this piece, rather than just trying to use up my leftover extras. So this is going to be really nice because it'll just be a coaster, which I love. What if we just go ahead and do an experiment on our coaster? Be careful. My gloves are sticky, with the goals, so let's just do that. That's pretty. We could also just play around on this layer some more because we're really building the layers on this piece. I could use the silver or the gold, and I could run some gold around here. So why not? Because we're just building interest on this layer. These little gold things make everything better. Maybe too much gold, but we're just going to work it. So what's really cool about doing it in layers like this is if there's any particular spot that you just love, like this little spot right here is really beautiful with the gold and the way that the color blended underneath it. I don't really like the outer yellow so I might be turning that into say, maybe an outer blue or something tomorrow. But if there's any area that you really love, we can cover that we're clear and then color up to that with some other color covering the color that's there, but still creating the extra depth and dimension that we want to see. We can completely change the look of it by tomorrow. But because we're building the layers, we're adding lots of depth and interest and we can keep any particular bit that we like by doing a little clear and colors up to that. It's super fun experimenting with the way that we lay colors. So for this layer, I've still got plenty of room to add to tomorrow. We're going to do this tomorrow. Then we may even have a few spots where we decide to add some acrylic lines with our Posca pens. Then we may still have a clear layer on top of that. So the minimum will have probably three layers. After I pull this out of the silicone, we may do a third final layer to smooth on any edges out. But this is starting out really fun. I do love our smaller pieces, and it looks like I do have enough room, especially in that one to do two layers. I'm pretty excited to tackle that one tomorrow. So now I'm going to let this sit overnight along with all of our other pieces that we started today and I will be back tomorrow. I know I just said that I was going to leave this alone for tomorrow when I'd actually turned off my lights and my camera and I was looking at the little tiny six piece set that we created earlier. One of those has colors that's similar. But I guess the heat gun worked at a little bit better since it was so small and the colors really blended, really cool. So before this has the chance to dry any further, I'm actually going to swirl these paints around and just make this layer even more different than it is because it's an underlayer. So I know I'll be putting another layer on top. Look at this almost looks like a peacock when you do it like this. I can feel that this resin is a tiny bit thicker so you can tell I turn this camera off for a while and when I was looking and then I was like, I just love the way the colors blended better. My goodness now it looks like a peacock. Now really like how that's doing. I can definitely tell the resin is a lot thicker, but it is still moving. If it gets too thick, you don't want to do this because then it won't settle down. So that is crazy, but let's hit it with a heat gun. That might have sped it up too because I worked it with a heat gun for so long a minute ago. Well, I'm just trying to see if that would mix anymore. But working with that heat gun a minute ago really did thicken that up quite a bit or it sat long enough that it was thick. But look how cool that is. I know it looks bright on my camera because I lightened it up. So let me fix that. Sorry. I wanted to film something else so I needed it brighter. I apologize for that little two-minute segment there. But look how amazing that looks. So if we come back in tomorrow and layer some colors in, and this is maybe one of the colors still showing through. That would be really pretty. I'm actually a little bit happier with the colors swirled together than I was a minute ago. So super fun. I didn't want to do that without showing you what I was doing. So now, I really am going to turn everything off and let this sit overnight and dry. Here we are back with our bigger piece. You see I just keep getting a little bigger and a little bigger. Because if you'll start with those little pieces, you can really get your techniques down and then if you go to the medium pieces, you can then translate that into a larger size. Then we get to these bigger pieces and you're feeling pretty good about it. So this is the one where we made the little tiny piece in the silicone mold and look how easy that just came out. It's really pretty. We do have some little edges here that leaped over from just being, I guess too tall. To get rid of those, I'm simply going to take my heavy-duty shears and just trim those off and you'll see they trim off really nice. Give you a very nice edge. Then we have a pretty little coaster out of leftover resin. I still have sitting at the top of my table, the little resins that we just mixed for the double Project 2 there that I haven't used up. So some of these I'm going to use in this project, and then I'm going to make another coaster or two with what I've got leftover of those colors if I don't use them in this piece. But I just thought that'd be fun to take a look at how pretty this turned out. We just trim off any little piece that's on the top with our heavy-duty scissors and then we're finished. That's done and we don't have to do anything else with it. So that's really pretty. So definitely have a couple of these little pre-made silicone pieces sitting around, if you can. I've mixed up a new batch of our resin and you'll notice that this looks yellow, but it's not actually the resin is clear. But I have used a container, that whole old resin in it. You can see there from the side, right down here, dried old resin and it continues to yellow and yellow. That's what happens when you use cheap resin from the hardware store. It continues to yellow, whereas this art resin does not yellow. So I do particularly love that the art resin holds up. I don't like the colors here, just like on the one that we did that with smaller. So on these pieces where we can do two or three layers of buildup, it's really nice to be able to fix layers that we don't love. But I did love this blue that we tried out. I liked the bronze. I like this blue. I even like this color here, which was the pigment powder. So I might just add to those more resin, stir them up and that'd be the layer that we're working on here with this piece. We've got at least two layers so we could possibly have a third layer in this. I'm going to have a new color here. Let me get another cup. I'm going to go and try these Copic alcohol inks. Because look how pretty some of these colors are, I just love them. So these I can just squirt in here and then add resin. I may add some of this to this blue one and change the color slightly. That might have been too much, we'll see. Then we'll get to mixing. That one's right on in there. Again, I'm just filling it up to about an inch of resin or at least trying to. Let's see what we did to this color. That's a pretty color. Look how pretty that color is, my goodness. So I'm actually in love with this color here. So I might put a little more in there and that may be the dominant color. Let's see. Some pieces are really pretty if you keep it to a neutral color. Then a couple of neutral colors and some glitter. Maybe you keep one dominant color. So that's not quite enough of the ink, and these Copic inks, I've noticed are not as strong as the [inaudible] or as the Ranger alcohol inks. Keep that in mind, the colors tend to be a little softer. This is so pretty, I have to have some more of this. My goodness. That is the prettiest color I've ever seen. But it's super-duper translucent, so we're definitely going to see this lower layer through it. We may come back with a third layer to really build up some of these colors and the depth. I might just add a little more blue to that because the acrylic paint is a little thicker than alcohol ink and that might give us some more body there. That is the prettiest color I think I've ever seen. Just in case you're wondering what this amazing blue is. It's called blue light, and that's a Blick matte acrylic tube of paint and that's really beautiful. So a couple of colors we're not using. We're going to use all of these and let's just start out. I may need some more of this because it's so beautiful and this is such a big piece. But we've got to start somewhere. So let's just go ahead and start laying some color. So I might lay a couple of rings of this and then fill in with the other colors, the other rings, and then use our heat gun to really mesh these around and see what we can get. This is the most beautiful color. So I think I see more of this color in my future on another piece. Let's start there. So I love this bronzy color that I've made. I may not use that dark blue at all. I may just use this pretty blue, some bronze and that pretty shimmery white color. Then we may build another layer up tomorrow. That's pretty. We may build a clear on top of that. This piece will most likely have four layers. That's what I like about doing these projects where you have, the first one is like a one layer and then a clear on top. So two layers and then the medium sized pieces, those were two layers. Now we'll do a clear on top, so that's technically three layers. In this one, we're going to have probably four layers. It's really interesting to see the differences as you move up inside and you got a size and you add the additional layers, how interesting your pieces get. I'm loving this one much better than I had. So let's just add some of this and [inaudible] We may have that yellow shine through at the end, but that's going to add interest to have some of the lower layers shine through. Now we've got this medium darker color, which is actually very similar to that bronzy layer. I may lay this color into that bronzy layer and separate some color out there. Add another dimension into that layer. I may come on the end here and add some. Then I'll definitely come and lay some more glass back in. Pretty these colors are. So if you want a pretty geo, you definitely use the pretty colors. Oh my goodness. Look how pretty this is. So I'm going to very sparingly try to add some silver, and I say sparingly because you saw what happened the first time I used the silver on that tiny piece. But I would like this silver to ring us out. Let's see what we can do. If I totally mess it up with too much of this, then we know we have one more layer to go. So we can still always fix it. I'm liking these colors. I got a lot of resin leftover, so I feel another project in our future after this. We'll see. Because we're not adding much more to this today, we're going to go ahead and spin this out with heat gun. This silver is so much more potent than the gold. That is crazy how much that has spread out compared to how much the gold spreads out. I'm really surprised how potent that silver is. What would happen if we drag our stick through? Well, it doesn't do anything. How insane is that? This stuff is so thick. I'm definitely glad we now have a third layer tomorrow because that would make me mad if that were my last layer and it just covered everything, but it is really pretty. Tomorrow, what I'm going to do is add another layer of the blue and the bronze and just get that really finished off. We'll see the silver shine through it, but I'm not sure that I'll do silver on that top layer because that silver's making me mad the way it just dominates everything. I'm sure that we could take our stick and even maybe pick some of that back up on a stick and get rid of it and then it just fills back in. Look at that. Tomorrow, the plan on this is to go ahead with a third layer of the blue and the bronze. Well that's pretty as I really swish it about. That makes me a little happier. This will be the underlayer, so I don't really feel like I'm ruining anything if I swish all that around. This will shine through some for us and give us some depth under whatever color we're adding tomorrow. This is actually much prettier, swished in. I'm a little better with that because when I layer some rings tomorrow that'll just be a shimmery underlayer. So I'm going to let this dry overnight and we'll be back to add the last layer. 12. Large Geode finishing up: All right. We have let this one dry overnight. I went ahead and I've got our colors mixed up here. In this, I've got this pretty blue and that's the one where I've mixed the blue and the ink together. Then I've got a glittery, just some of this ink and I've put about maybe 15 drops of ink in there with some glitter. I've put a little glitter in the blue. Then I've got that bronze powder, and then I've got that white iridescent powder. I'm just going to go ahead and make our last layer and then tomorrow, we'll have a layer of clear that we'd probably put on top of this. I'm just going to start ringing our layers here, making sure I keep my little drippy stick over here on the paper. I'm just going to ring some layers and we'll see what we can get. Then you want to be super careful when you're on this last layer that you don't lay in so much of this resin that you spill it over the sides, because now you've got the least amount of room to work. You fill it up pretty full. You don't want to lay super heavy layers of resin at this point and run everything off. Because the underlayer is so pretty, I'm just going to ring this ring a couple times. I want some of these to just give me some variations. Because this layer underneath it is so pretty, some of these are going to be kind of transparent. Well, let's just use the rest of this here. Hang on. I found if I leave a little at the bottom of this, I end up wasting it. If you're down to the bottom, if you go ahead and try to do it while it's still pretty runny, you end up wasting less resin at the end. This is that bronzy iridescent one. If you get to the end and you think I got enough color, you can always fill on top of that with clear. This is that white iridescent one, and then this is the blue, greenish teal ink with the glitter. I just really want this one to have pretty rings because if you look at some of the geodes, some of them have tons and tons of rings like a tree. The tree rings, a lot of the geodes have those same rings like they just formed as it was pressing different stones together or something. They have that pretty rings like a tree ring does, so I really just want these to turn into pretty rings. Now that we've got basically all the resin poured that I created for the colors, and then tomorrow we'll do a clear coat, I'm going to come back and add some more stone and this is the one that looks a little greenish in color. Then I'm going to run the heat gun around it and smash some of these colors together. I guess I could run the heat gun first and come back and add the stones. Hang on. Let's do that. Look how pretty those colors are. I don't know if they come off on camera as pretty as there are in-person, but man, that's pretty. I'm going to go back in and just start very carefully adding some stones. Let's put it in a little cup. It'll make this a little easier to control. I'm just going back and putting stones in the spots we already had stones so your stones are in all the layers too, not just on one layer on this one. But you can do it all on one layer if you want to wait till, say, the end or something, but I like having an idea as I'm laying it what I'm doing. They look pretty. Then we'll do just a few over here again. That's pretty. I'm not really worried about what I've got in the center layer because obviously, we can pick that up in a little while. After this has dried, we can get that back out of there. That's pretty. Then as with what's on the top, we'll let whatever is in there stick and whatever is loose tomorrow, I'll just pour back off. Look how pretty that is, I'm loving that. Now this again, we got to let it sit and dry overnight. We're done with this so far. I'm going to go put it back in my photography tent and let this set up. I got just to the point where if I did anymore, it would be looping over my wall here. You just have to be real careful with what you're planning to do and how many layers. I'm glad we went on with that third layer because you can really see the depth going in here. You can see some of the lower stuff shining through this upper layer. It just has such beautiful depth and detail. We're going to let this dry overnight and then tomorrow we'll take it out of the mold, will pour a clear coat to finish it off and give it a nice finished edges and everything, and then we'll be done with this piece. Let's go dry this and I'll be back. This one is now really pretty the way those layers meshed. I can see through the layers to the underlayer is a little bit. The depth and detail that's showing up on this piece is so pretty. We're going to go ahead and pull this out of our mold now. I'm just going to see if we can separate some of it before I pull it out. I really like these multilayers and this one's got at least three layers on it and then possibly a fourth with the top layer if we coat it with clear. But I think, because it is so pretty I might just trim off my sharp pieces and wax the edges with a gold wax so that it's finished, we'll see here. This is a nice, sturdy piece with all these layers and resin. Love it. We'll see, that's just coming right off. Turn this over here, and then we've still got this piece of silicone here. Let's just pull that right off. Lovely. Got that piece so we could just take right off of there. Look how pretty the back is. Very psychedelic and glittery. That side's really pretty. Now this piece is so beautiful. I think rather than do another clear layer on top of that, because it's in there pretty firmly. I might go ahead and trim these edges, take a little bit of sandpaper and sand off anything that I don't love if I need to. I'm just going to come through there and see if I can just make a nice edge here by trimming it. Because I really like it just like it is. Let's see. We can come and trim the lip too, like I've got that little lip there I'm trimming. Then if you like the edge, that's fine. If you don't like the edge, then we'll do one last clear coat. I'm trimming it pretty good, but it does make it not shiny. I think even though I was not wanting to do one final code, I might go ahead and do it anyway. Because these pieces are so beautiful, I want to display them and I want them to be a finished piece of amazing art. Because you know what if you're selling this, you don't want to sell it unfinished, you definitely want it to be completely finished going in somebody's house. If there's anything super sharp, I'm trimming that off. But the next layer resonal get that too. I feel like even though I didn't want to do another layer, I feel like we have to. This is just 24 hours later. If you wait several days, it's not going to be as pliable as it still is so that I can do this. It's going to be cured because it takes 24 hours and it's nice and dry and you can do stuff with it. But after that, it's cured and you really can't do much more with that because it's hardened to its hardest state, and you really want it to do pretty quick. Don't pour a piece and know that you're going to be gone for a couple of days and can't get back to it because it's really going to be too hard. You need to plan where you're going to be able to get to it the very next day. Now I need to be left-handed to get on this curve here. This is a case where you might come in and just try with your x-acto and see if you can trim an edge that's just not trimmable with a pair of scissors. It's not necessarily going to be super easy , but it's doable. Like see, I do get that trim. That's just not as easy as with the scissors. See, I trimmed right off. If you've got an edge that you just can't do, then you can come over here with a razor knife and very carefully shave that off. It's easier if you shave it rather than do a great big giant piece because you saw the shading came off pretty easy. But you can shave the edges, so that is an option, and I'm just getting anything that's loose or sharp or. I'm actually using this little knife as a tiny bit easier than the scissors. Now that I'm doing it, but be careful because we're working with glass that right there, just snagged my skin. Who know, you could just cut little pieces of glass with scissors. But I'm trying to make it safe. I don't want this to be cutting me every time I touch it. I'm just going through and getting any edges that I don't like. Again, be super careful because that glass cut my skin. Not really a big deal, but I just want you to be aware. But look how pretty that is. I think because we did that, I'm definitely going to have to do another coat on top of this. It might be a good opportunity to actually draw in a few of the lines with maybe a gold Posca pen, perhaps, just to say that we did it. This is a really fine tipped Posca pen. I have silver and I have gold, so I could do this in silver or I could do it in gold because we have that bronze in there. Because we have bronze and we have silver speckles, so we have a choice there that we could do either color. I almost feel like because we have all that silvery glitter, it might need to be the silver. This is a fine tip. I actually like the tip that's a tiny bit bigger than this. There's fine-tipped Poscas, there's brush-tipped Poscas, and then the regular Posca, which looks like that, which is a medium tip. But these, I happened to pick up in a fine tip, so it is what it is, and you just punch it down a little bit to get the color flowing. Then now's the time to decide where you want to put a few lines to possibly make them stand out. We could follow this line right here and see that would pull that out. It's going in like this, so I could do another line. I'm just really seeing the color under here do its thing, and following the line of the color under there, which is pretty cool. Starting out, it might be better that we have this fine tipped one because it's not as big and bold a line so it's not going to really be as detracting as a great big giant line, but it is shiny. That's pretty fun. I'm going to go ahead and we'll do a few more of these. Remember, if you make a mistake or you get all done and you think I don't love it, you can take it back off with the alcohol, but we're simply making the geode lines really just more vibrant and visible. You'll see this in a lot of pieces that you find on the Internet. I messed up on that line, let's just get a little bit of alcohol, and we'll redo that. See how easy that is to fix? Let that dry, and then we could try it again. Let's go ahead and fix this one. This one's tied in there. If I get something that's real tied in there, I might just take a paintbrush, wrap the tip of this around the back of the brush, and so I can really get in there exact without redoing an entire line. See now, I don't have to redo the whole thing on something if I don't want. I can just fix a very tiny flaw. That's really fun, just adding in some really vivid geode lines. Then again, if you do that and you decide, "Well, I don't love that," we can always just take our alcohol and remove them. They are fun, I like to experiment with them. I do encourage you to maybe do one piece, probably one of the smaller pieces to begin with and just see, do you love it? Do you not love it? Do we love it just on the edge? Because I do love this part right here, but not necessarily this part right here. This is a situation where we could then say, "Well, I love part of that, but not the other part of it," and we could remove some of this. Then we could redo it, but we have a few minutes. We can come through and take some of this back off. The longer it dries, the harder it is, but still fixable if we want to do something different. I actually love that top set. It can be strategic. We don't have to have it on the whole thing. My own personal preference and after you look at plenty of samples on say, Pinterest, if you look at resin geodes, there's lots of samples out there. Some people like tons and tons of lines and some of them are more natural where you just see the color mesh and meld, which I really love, because in these, the colors blend into each other without a strong line in between them. Or is this one the colors are very strong lines and you can see there's like line, line, line, line, little tiny like rings of a tree. There's lines all in this one that are very vivid. On this, you might have lots of lines. There's geodes in either way, you just have to decide what is your preference when you are making them and do some practicing. I encourage you to use the brand of pins that you can erase. It's actually like that line there and even like this line here. I'm going to leave that line because I do love that line. I don't like the lines everywhere else. That's just a fun, tiny extra little detail that we can do there. Then if you want to sign the back of your pieces and you want it to be permanent, then I'd recommend these Deco color pieces because that ain't coming off and you might sign it and date it on the back side if you want. Or if you want to assign it on the front side like in a little corner or something, you could do that with this Deco paints. You saw that was permanent. That would be the perfect thing to sign your pieces of art with. These are fine line Deco color, opaque paint markers. Whatever color you happen to like silver, gold, black, white doesn't matter. You'll see I said fine line. It was not nearly as fine tipped as this. You could sign it with Posca pen if you want it to do it on that layer under your last clear layer, so your choice there. I think we've decided we definitely need one final clear layer to really clean up the sharp edges on this. I will be back in a bit. I'm taping the bottom to do that last layer of the clear. I'm actually doing three pieces all at the same time here. But I just wanted to show you again when we take this off for pouring more acrylic on top, you want to tape off the inside and the outside if you've got a hole in it. It took me several pieces to go around obviously. Then I just take my exact dough knife and I trim the edge of the tape on the inside and the outside and follow along with the curve of my piece, because you don't want to have this lip of tape catching any resin that's falling over the side. You definitely want to put the tape on, trim all the edges Then once you've got all the edges trimmed, you want to come back through and just make sure that they're all secure on the edge. Then we're ready to flip it over and pour. Don't forget when you're doing those pour layers and we're outside of our mold, make sure that you're taping the bottom or you'll have a bunch of drips and unsightly pieces stuck to the bottom and this is how we avoid that. Once I get this taped off and I smooth it down all the edges, I'm going to pour my resin and just let it spill over the sides and I'm going to let that sit. Then in about eight hours, and eight hours seems to be the magic number, I'm going to come back up here. At that point, it's no longer tacky. It's still wet, it's still pliable and it's not cured, but it's not tacky so it will allow me to peel the tape off relatively easily because if you wait the full 24 hours, you're not going to get the tape off hardly at all and it'll be up onto the resin and become part of the piece. It seems like. Wait eight hours, come up here. It can't be tacky to the touch. You don't want to gouge it or do anything like I did on this piece that we were just talking about in the bonus project. You want to go ahead and wait eight hours, come back, and then peel the tape off and you will be set and then the next day it'll be cured. After we get that trimmed out, I have this sitting in a box top with two cups turned upside down and I'm just going to have this sitting like that in between the two cups. When you're doing that, you don't want the cups to be near the edges so that if the resin runs onto the cup, you don't want your piece stick into the cup either. I'm centering those cups under my piece where all the edges are free and they're not going to be touching the the cup. I've taken this off of it stand. This one we let dry overnight with that last layer of clear on it. Look how incredible this piece is. We've got some layers I can see down into the piece. It's almost like a lake. I can see down into the layers of the water. They're so beautiful and deep and rich. This is definitely one of my favorite pieces and I love the colors and I love the pretty stone on it. I love the little bit of drawing detail that I left and then I did not draw on the rest of it because I liked that little tiny bit. I like the hole in the middle. On the edges, I'm going to go back and finish it with probably the gilding cream because that's what I really like. Then look how pretty the back is. The back is completely different so somebody sees the back, it's still really pretty. I'm loving this piece pretty good. I hope that this larger piece really gets you excited and you can see even if you don't love the very first layer that you put down, that we can continue to layer this one up a couple of times and end up with something really beautiful. This I would probably end up displaying on a shelf on a plate rack or something where I could really get the full benefit of how beautiful this piece is. That's one option for displaying this. These larger pieces also make really pretty tabletops. If you did a piece that were big enough that you could do the top of a table, then you could attach this to some table legs with a nice heavy-duty glue. Another thing that you could do is you could frame this out in a three-dimensional shadow box frame. You could also attach the chain on the back and make this where you can hang it up in a window, perhaps. There's quite a few ways that something like this could be displayed. If you had the whole center part that was solid, you could use it as something fun, like a cheese tray in your kitchen. This has tons of fun things you can do with it. I'm pretty excited at how pretty this turned out. I hope you enjoyed this third project and seeing how building up the layers creates beautiful depth and that you can see that even if you don't love the layer underneath it, how that adds to the beauty of the final top layer and that you can go as many layers as you'd like as far as you have enough built up on your silicone mold and really if you got to the top layer and you thought, I still don't love this, but my mom is not tall enough. There's nothing at all that says you couldn't add another layer of silicone to your mold and then build it up some more if you needed to. It's really a very forgiving process and then the results that we end up with are so beautiful. I hope you enjoyed this project. I do have a couple of little bonus projects that I just couldn't help myself to create. I hope you loved those too. I will see you back in class. 13. Geode on square cradled board: I'm actually going to film a couple of projects that I really didn't plan on filming because I still have mixed up resin and I have to use it anyway. So I thought, well, why not film whatever it is I'm doing and just have extra bonus project in here so that if you're working with other things like a cradle board, because remember I showed you some cradle boards that I had and they're just wood-sided boards, and these are really deep sides. So with the resin, you got to definitely make a conscious effort how deep do you want the sides because if you're going to have any of this run over, then you have to account for that much more resin to run over. This is an eight-by-eight panel that had a three-quarter side in the back. What I've done is I've gone ahead and used our FrogTape and I have taped off the sides and the back so that when I put resin on these, I can then peel that tape off later and this will not be on the sides. Then I can paint the sides and I could've painted them before I started, but I have wet resin that I don't want to go to waste. So I went ahead and just tape the sides and figured I will paint these later. These were already primed on the top because I keep some of these around to play with encaustics. We're going to look at a little different technique. Since I still have colors mixed up, we're going to just do a resin pour randomly, completely different than the geode technique on this one, just to experiment and try something different. This would be most similar to an acrylic pour. There's a couple of ways, and also another thing I want to mention, I have a sample here of a really old piece that I did. If you have a wood top, you might want to go ahead and paint that into a color or white before you start pouring stuff on it. Here's an old piece that I did. If you have any of the woods showing through or something that's not painted, you're going to see that through any kind of translucent resins. So just be aware of that. If you want to have that not be wood shining through, you need to go ahead and paint that first. This is one where I did not tape it off so I have resin down the sides, and if you do that and you're like, "Oh, crap, I forgot to paint it, I forgot to tape it off," you can sand this with a belt sander. I wouldn't do it by hand, but you could, or a block sander maybe. You can sand the side of that and you can get rid of all that, and then you can still paint it or do whatever else you'd like to do. Just a couple of points I was thinking about. On this particular one, I'm actually going to mix a little bit of clear. I will take this stick out since it's in my way. I'm going to mix a little bit of clear and then I'm going to mix some other colors into this resin. We're going to do a little resin dump and just see what we can get. I'm not trying to pour these all in here and mix them up. I'm going to do a little stir, and then we're going to let those do their thing when we pour it out. This is helping me use any leftover resin, too. We're not trying to mix it and make a new color, we're trying to just mix it and let them swirl and do their thing. I'm going to pour them all in here. Perfect use for a last little set of colors that you've got, if you'll keep a couple of little cradle boards handy or those silicone molds that we make the coasters out of. Again, if you want the painting to be pretty when you're done, use the pretty colors. If we mixed all the colors together and I added in, say, this red that's not my favorite, I might not like it when we're done. So I may just keep this pour to the colors I actually like and hopefully I got enough resin to do what we need to do. I may need to mix some more of this resin. I want some more of this color, so let's go ahead and just mix. I still got some here in my bucket. Let's just get all that out of there. This is fun. I think that the acrylic pours are particularly beautiful. Then you'll notice to that I have a big old mess. Just got all over my hands, yummy. We're going to make this the pearls. Let me swap a glove. I got boxes of gloves. You'll notice it's sitting in a pan really. This is an old pan that's up here in my photography room, which I would only recommend you do that if you don't care about the pan. Maybe get some pans from the Goodwill or some box tops or something. I have just put a palette paper from my pad of palette paper that I've been using this whole time and I did put palette paper. But you can get disposable palettes at any art store. I'm knocking stuff out of my drawers there. Then I've just formed it in here and taped it because this will catch any resin fall off that we have, and we can just take it off and throw it away when we're done. Yeah, like that. Let's just pour that one into our other one. You can see, I'm just pouring these right in on top of each other. I'm not trying to get everything. I had some powder that fell on that one. That's all right. This is definitely going to be a hodgepodge when we're done, and that is the purpose. I have a tiny bit of this bronze. I'm keeping this to those blue colors and that pretty translucent luminous white powder color and the blues. Enough of that. The only thing I left is the yellow and the pink. I don't really want to do that. This definitely feels like enough to put down on this, so I'm just doing it a tiny bit. We're not trying to create a new color here. Now we're going to go ahead and let it do its thing and see what we got. Now if you do this and it doesn't get all the way to the edges, we can very gently tilt. Or we can use a silicone spreader, and we can try to coax it towards the edge. Or we can use our heat gun and run it towards the edge. So let's do that. So that's really pretty and it looks a bit geodish, and we can come through and put some stones on here if we really wanted that to look like our geodes. We could leave it just like that. We could also drip our silver or gold on there and see what that does, too. We could play with that. I know what we could even try, and I don't know if this is going to work. It's this experiment here. We could drip a thing of our ink here in this color, and then hit it with the heat gun and see what that does. Well, that was pretty fun there, too. That's a fun experiment there with the color and the gold. Maybe I'll go ahead. I like the way this spider web is out here. Let's just go ahead and put some more of these in there and watch how they spiderweb. This is the time to really explore and experiment on a piece like this that you weren't even expecting to do, but you had enough stuff left over that you didn't want to waste it. This is when you'll be really glad that that base is painted because you can see plenty of white shining through that. That's really cool right there. We can add some stones in there, if we really wanted to make that stand out with some stonework. We could let this dry overnight and come back and add another layer. But if you do that, then we have to take the tape off at about the seven or eight-hour mark, just like with the bottoms of those little pieces that we're doing, because you don't want that resin to fully cure for a whole night with that tape on like that or you won't get it off. Then you'd have to put a new layer of tape on tomorrow with the next layer that you added because this might be another one that needs to have more than one layer. So we probably want to come back and take that tape off in about seven or eight hours when it's still pliable, but the top is not sticky. Then maybe we'll do another layer tomorrow. That was pretty fun pouring colors on top like that. I'm definitely going to revisit this one with more colors tomorrow and we may make it look more like an actual geode, but on a board instead of the preformed molds that we did. This is a fun little bonus project to use up some extra of your colors. I'm going to set this one to the side and let it be drying and I'll be back. Let's come back to this piece here. I pulled the tape off last night at about the eight-hour mark, and that really does seem to be like the magic number for getting the tape off and it not being sticky and everything coming off nice and easily. I've just put a brand new piece of tape on the side for this next layer. Actually, I love this and I love the spirit of pouring it on, but I'm going to try the pour again, but I'm going to pour them all into one container just like we did using the colors that I like because I really want this to be maybe a complementary piece to the other one. Then I think I want a strip of stone maybe or something where we do the whole edge or something. I'm going to pour these on here and let them do their thing, and then we're going to add some stones. I'm just going to get really crazy here and pour these colors into one tiny bit of a stir, but not really and then we're going to do the pour thing like we did yesterday and just see what we get because that is really super fun. Let's just do this. It's fun to experiment, and I've always wanted to try the acrylic pours, which I have not played with personally, and this is in the spirit of an acrylic pour. Let's just do one little stir here. Super quick, not trying to combine any of the colors, and then let's just see what we can get. Let's think about this for a second. I want some stones over here. I want it to be almost like a really close-in of a geode. So maybe I'll go on the diagonal rather than in a circle. Because then when we put the stones on this other side, they'll look like we've got a really nice close-up. I got to get out a little further before I run out of resin here. We're definitely going to push this around with a heat gun because I just got really super happy on one side. Let's push that around with a heat gun. I love already what that just did because we just got lots and lots of resin geode layers. That is really pretty. Now what we need to decide is do we want to put, I really think this side is my favorite. So maybe I want to put the stones on an angle on this side. Then we'll let these be all our little geode layers because how pretty is that? I think I'm going to go back in with the champagne stones because they are the most neutral and that really seems to be so pretty with this. Make sure we don't have any big pieces of glass in here. We don't want those sticking. These are just too big, I think, or I can have it strategic in there, I guess, but I'd rather control that than them fall out of the cup. I'm just going to start pouring and maybe I'll just do a whole little arc here. Let's just see. That right there is almost pretty enough, isn't it, but I want it to go to the edge. That was a pretty arc. Great big pieces, we'll just pull the great big ones off. Look how pretty that is. We could actually even do another little arc. Oh my goodness. This one has some of the under layer coming through. We can see it right there. It is so pretty. So pretty. Some of these are sinking right down in that blue resin and some are sitting on top, and we may not have the very top one stick, but we'll just see what we get. That is so pretty. Maybe we'll just do a tiny arc right here. Not go into the edge or nothing, but just a little following along what we've just added there. Get that big one out of there. Look how pretty that is. I'm going to come back and then we'll stop that one there. We'll come back in about eight hours and peel our tape again, and then we'll reevaluate this one tomorrow and see if we want to add some geode lines perhaps or just see. It may be pretty just like that. Let's let that one dry and I'll be back. Got another experiment that I want to talk about. This is the one we are going to put some lines on. Then if we love the lines, great. If we don't love the lines, then you could take them back off depending on what kind of paint pen that you use to put the lines on. Lot of little resin pieces that you see have lines in it because geodes typically have a lining in them. People add lines with paint pens, and there is a difference in the paint pens. I actually have several of these pens by DecoColor. When you open them up, they have a strong fragrance. You can tell that it's something that would need, say, like a turpentine clean up or something like that. This is an opaque marker and it's got a tip just like the Posca pens. You might think I've got some of these markers, I could use them. You definitely could. They draw really nicely on your piece. When you're drawing your lines and deciding what you want to do here and you're drawing on it, you need to go ahead and have a good idea in your mind what you want. You don't want to stop and start. You don't want to do anything that's going to stay on your piece and be permanent. Let me draw on some Posca pen on here just to give you an idea, and you want to be organic with your lines. I just had a nice mess up there. If you had stripes, like we have really defined stripes here on this one, this might be a case where we follow our stripes and add in some lines. You'll notice I'm doing this with a Posca pen on this one. But this might be a case where you're following the lines. You're just making them a little more defined. You want to do a little of this on one of your practice pieces before you do it on your final piece and maybe you just outline all the colors there. Then you would do a strip of a layer of the white on top of that and seal those lines in. Now, the main difference in our Posca pen and your other paint pens is if you have a little bit alcohol and you mess up, with the Posca pens, you can rub those lines back off. If I just took a little bit alcohol on here, I can come back, then I can get rid of anything that I drew on there. If tried it and I didn't like it, I can get it off. You'll notice with this other pen, I cannot get that off. If you try to experiment with different paint brands, do it on a little piece that's not important because if you do it on a big important piece and you don't like it, you're stuck with that marking being on your piece. Now the only way that we would be able to get rid of that or hide that is to do another color layer on top of there, which we can certainly do. But I just wanted you to know right up front, if you're going to draw in some of the very popular geode lines, Posca pen is the only one that is forgiving and will let you fix a mistake, or if you did it and you just absolutely didn't like it, you could take it back off before your piece was finished. Definitely a reason to use the Posca brand. It comes in a lot of different colors. You don't have to do it in a white or a black if you had a pretty blue or maybe this brown color would be really pretty. I want a brown one. We could have done that with some gold. I have a real fine tip gold one here, and that would be pretty if we followed our lines. It's a little more subtle than the white. It makes a really pretty line there. That would've been a good choice on there. Then again, if we don't like it, we can come right on here with some alcohol and get it right back off. Posca is the way to go if you're going to draw in geode details, which a lot of people do. As you look at samples, say, on Pinterest, you'll see some detailed lines drawn and this is the ones you want to do that with. Because I put some lines on here with the permanent pen to show you what that would look like, that's permanent now. I either need to decide that I like them or one more coat of some colored pigment so that we can cover it up if I don't like it. Then this was going to get another clear coat anyway. I think now what this is going to get is a little bit more color so to cover up that line there and add maybe a few more line details because this is the one that we did as a paint pour. I like to use a paint pour, but it's a lot less detailed than the other one. So I might like to actually have a few lines on there. I may go ahead and mix up some resin and do some lines. I'm going to take the sides off again, and then we'll see what this one looks like tomorrow. I'll be back. Let me show you what I just accidentally discovered to help you out. If you use a paint pen that you don't like the marks on and you didn't use the Posca pen that I recommended, I just thought because the Deco pen is such a strong smell that I figured it was some type of oil-based product maybe and that's why the alcohol wouldn't get it off. Then I thought that's how you clean your brushes, why not use my brush cleaner? This is just an odorless solvent. It's the turpentine, but it's an odorless. Here's the one I got actually. I've got the archival oils, odorless solvent, so I don't have to work with a bunch of stuff that stinks. This works. You just put a little on a paintbrush, put it right over these paint lines. Comes right off. How amazing. Just a little bit of an update on a mistake because I really love the way this layer turned out and I didn't want to have to do a whole another layer on top of it. How fun is that that we can actually fix something if we do something on top of it and we didn't like it? There we go. Now our lines are done. That being said, I still think I have to do another clear layer on top of this because apparently when I pulled my tape off last night, I was not as careful as I should have been and I scratched it. If you end up pulling your tape off at the little bit less than eight-hour mark because I was just being impatient and you end up gouging your piece somehow because you weren't paying enough attention, we can fix that with a last clear coat. But I didn't want to have to pour any more color on here, so I love that. Then after you use your odorless solvent on there, you do need to go back with your alcohol and just clean it real quick because that solvent actually has a little bit of residue perhaps go in there. We just want to get any residue. Anywhere that you touched, you want to clean that off with alcohol before you do your last layer of resin. Because the resin site recommends that you sand in-between each layer, but you don't have to. You just have to make sure to get any kind of oils off of the top of there from where you might have been touching it. There we go. Now, one last little clean off and we're ready to actually coat it now. Whether I wanted to or not, I want to hang these up and I don't want the gouges in it. Now I'll be back. Now this one is dry. Look how beautiful this is and it's really dimensional, too. If I hold this up to the side, you can really see that those stones stand up so much on this piece. This is a really nice dimensional piece, and look how beautiful the colors ended up. I'm really glad I kept going on this and put that last clear layer on top because it really has some nice depth details. I love this gold stuff here. I love how the rocks are really standing up on this. I'm going to probably gilt the sides of this one with a gold wax which is pretty fun to use. That one is not gold, it's one of these. I'm just going to show you real quick. This is DecoArt Metallic Lustre, and this is the gold rush color. What I really like about this stuff is you can just wrap a rag and this is a roll of blue shop towels. What I like about shop towels is they don't produce the little rubble bits that come off of paper towels. This leaves bits of paper towel in your piece, whereas these don't. These are lint-free. The paper towels are very linty. My paste wax has been in there for a bit, so we'll have to just warm that up a bit. But what I like about this is you just put it into the wax and you come along to the side, and then we can just wax the sides. I may need to heat my wax up a bit to get it flowing really good or maybe just let my fingers sit there for a bit. But I'm going to wax the sides of this one so that the entire side is a really pretty metallic color. Then I will call this one done. I hope you loved this bonus project and seeing how building up here with the rock really makes this piece beautiful and dynamic. Then this is ready to hang. Once you finish those sides, you're ready to hang this on the wall. Really beautiful piece and I hope you enjoyed this bonus project. I'll see you back in class. 14. Geode on cradled board with stones: [MUSIC] Hi, I just can't quit playing for today. I mixed up a little more resin [LAUGHTER] and I'm just going to do another little side project here. Make sure I got a little resin on the board there. Let's get it off. I'm just going to do another one. I have a second little board prepped with the tape on it and it's going to the box so we can get that off in a little while. I liked these blues so much that I mixed up some blue paint with the Copic various inks, which is the alcohol ink. Here we go. This is color BG72 ice ocean, which is one I really love. Then I also mixed up one of those bronze colored powders. I mixed up in the blue cup some silver, so it actually is silver and blue mixed, but I thought, why not. I'm going to actually create a little geode piece here. Maybe like the stone here and then all the layers coming out from it and just see because why not. I'm actually going to just start not in the outside coming in. I'm going to start from the inside going out and just experiment. Then I'm going to put some stones in the center part here after I've laid some colors out. Look how pretty that color is. Oh my goodness, I think I'll lay some more of this color out while I've got it going. Again, if you don't want wood showing through any colors that are transparent, make sure you paint that board or use one that's pre primed so you don't have any chance of wood showing through under through your colors because on that really old piece where I had the woods showing through, I was liking it, but then it had all that wood showing through and I ended up not liking it. I certainly could have gone back and added more layers to it, but at that time I just was so disgusted. I just didn't want to bother with it and now I probably would go back and add some other colors to it and just play. This is some fun colors. I think I'm going to go back in with some silver. Then we'll run these layers around with our heat gun then we'll see tomorrow if we need to add another layer on it. That's fine. Now I want to add some glass. Let's get that champagne colored glass. [NOISE] That's fun. I like that. That's super fun. I'm dying to add the silver, but the silver does not look nearly as good to me. Let's run it around with the heat gun now. [inaudible] [MUSIC] Actually, I don't like how this one spot ends in white. Let's go ahead and make that blue. [MUSIC] [NOISE] Now, these turnout really pretty, and when I add a few more stripes in there, it really blends so beautifully. I think I'm going to very light handedly try to add a few more stripes of color right on top of our existing color because all those layers of color are what make these so beautiful. They blend in and it doesn't stand out. Oh my goodness, so pretty. Let's add some more of this blue. Let's mix that and see what we got. Where is my paper towel? [LAUGHTER] Here we go. Now I got stuff all over my fingers. [MUSIC] That's looking so pretty but I think I need more crystals in my center part there. Oh my goodness, look how pretty that is. At the risk of messing it up, I think for today, I'm going to stop and let this dry for seven or eight hours and we're going to pull the tape. Then this one could possibly be done. We will see because I'm genuinely in love with these colors. This pretty light blue and bronze is so pretty together. Now, we'll evaluate this one tomorrow and see what we think. But flat geode on a cradle board is another fun thing to try with your resin stuff if you don't want to do a free form mold. Really pretty. This one would be even be a really good candidate, possibly for us to use our Posca pens and add in some geode lines and then clear coat it on top of that. Definitely got some yummy experimenting to do with this one. Very pretty. I will be back when this is dry tomorrow. Well, I'll peel the paint off and then I'll be back [LAUGHTER] to do the next part. Here is this one all dry. I got to tell you, it is so beautiful. See, I just pick it right back out of there. What's nice now is I can just get rid of the palette paper or I can just peel the resin off the palette paper and keep on using this pod if I want to, because that resin probably just peel right off of there. I came back last night at about the eight hour mark and pulled our tape off. This is one where I might not do anything major to the side other than paint the side in, say like a nice neutral, say charcoal color perhaps because I've got a pretty charcoal here that I love. I might just paint the sides and call this one finished. I was going to put some resin lines in it. I mean, I was going to draw on it, but I think I'll wait and draw on the one tomorrow, the other bonus project because it's so striking with the colors that we have on it that it might look pretty with some lines. This one, I think it's so pretty like that that I hate to mess it up. Basically, all I'm going to do to finish this off is come back with some acrylic paint. You can do that in any color that you want, and I'm going to paint the sides. Then this one's ready to hang or do whatever it is that you'd like to do with it. I usually like to do two coats of acrylic paint on the sides, but look how pretty that is and then the piece is finished. So pretty. I hope you really liked this bonus project. You come up with a few on a cradled board surface, which is completely different than making our own molds and it gives a completely different look. I hope you definitely give this one a try out because this is one of my favorite out of all of these that we've done. I'm glad I went ahead and kept on playing instead of just stopping at the free forms which I find are always really pretty also because this one I will keep and hang in my house. I love it. See you back in class. [MUSIC] 15. Making a Sun catcher: [MUSIC] In this video, I'm just going to show you how I've made sun catchers out of these. Because I've actually made, I'm going to hang all of these in my windows and I've actually just attached a little bit of chain onto each of these and I'm just going to show you how I did that. It doesn't have to be difficult to do something like this. I'm sure there's lots of other ways that people figure out how to hang things like this in a window, but this is what I have done just to keep it simple for myself is glued our chain just into our little dab of glue here on the back, and these are sturdy and I'm using the E6000 clear, heavy-duty adhesive and this stuff glues plastic and metal and fabric, and you name it and it probably glues it. If you have a big enough little spot there of glue, it just holds that right in there. That doesn't move, it's not coming off, it's not going to separate. You could do that with a piece of chain, you could do that with a piece of ribbon, you could attach a piece of ribbon and run that through the chain and have the actual piece on here be a piece of ribbon holding the chain. There's several things that we could do here. I'm sure that you can find a few more solutions on how to hang these if you were looking around but this one's super easy, so I'm just going to show you how I did that real quick on a piece that I haven't attached to the chain to yet. You just need to decide how you want that to hang. Do you want it to hang like this? Do you want it to hang like this? You just need to decide as you're looking around at what's the best place and the shape you want it to hang and this one almost looks like a heart to me. I want it to hang in this way. I'm just going to flip it over, I think I'm going to set this on a shock towel. You've got this little bit of chain here, it's the smallest size chain that I found at the hardware store. For each of these, we're not using very much at all. That's probably six inches, so you decide how much chain you want. I just eyeballed it like this and thought, well, that's about right, because what I've done is I've found these little Command hooks by 3M. They're just clear hooks. These, the way that they're created is you can stick them on anything but later you can remove them and it doesn't damage the surface. I got the clear ones since I'll be hanging these in the window and then when I decide I don't want to hang these anymore in the window, I can pull the hook off without doing any damage and it's the perfect size hook for our chain. It just hooks right in there and then they'll just be hanging in the window like that. I love that. That's how I'll be hanging them. You just decide about how long do you want the chain, and then I have found that I need two pairs of needle-nose pliers to do this because what we're going to do is it'll have one side that's not a complete set and we just need to take our needle-nose pliers and open that loop up, and then that piece is just done. Now we have a nice closed loop on this side and then once we decide how long we want this chain, and you could measure all the chains and having the same length that this was something you were going to do a bunch of. If we say I want this chain to stop here, then I'm going to open the loop of the one next to it just by doing that right there. Now I'll just leave that for the next time, it doesn't matter. Now I have two ends that are closed and ready. These have one end that if you have it this way, you have it sitting one way, the whole loop sits up. If you have it sitting the other way, it sits flat. I'm going for the side that sits flat because I'm going to have this in a dollop of glue. I'm going to make sure that both sides are on the side that sits flat there and just decide where you want those loops sitting. I have it sitting close to the top. I don't want that to be a feature from the sun coming through, I want that to be its own little thing. I don't want to attach it here and then when the sun shines through, all I see is chain and stuff. I really want it to be at the top. What I'm going to do is just pick that up and put a dollop of glue and mash it right down into the glue, and then add a little more glue to the top so that, that metal piece is completely encased in a bubble of glue and then that will dry clear and that will hold our piece of chain permanently. Once you get the dollop of glue on the resin piece and then the dollop of glue on top of the resin piece on top of the chain there, adjust it if you need to reposition it in any way and then you need to let that sit overnight. Then tomorrow, it is completely secure and permanent. That's how easy it is to attach a chain to hang these up in the window and that would work on any size. I could definitely attach a chain to one of these larger ones and it would work on that size also because this is pretty sturdy. It would probably be just fine too for the very largest piece if you decided that you wanted to hang the great big ones in the window. Just decide how you want to hang it and then this is one option. I hope you enjoyed that and I will see you back in class. [MUSIC]