Today I was planning on doing some more prep work to an old window (cleaning up the wood frame / painting it) so I can use it for a mosaic. I hate doing that, so it wasn’t hard to get side tracked into making another batch of beachy coasters. My neighbor has been asking me to make some for her with the pigment as water (instead of beads / glass that I often use), so I cleared off my work surface and got creative.
For these, I poured a very thin layer of clear resin in the mold and let it sit for a while. While it was sitting, I mixed the pigments up (four different colors, three blues and one green) in separate cups. I then placed some shells and shark teeth in the resin. My sister recently sent me a bag of shark teeth (mostly found during my childhood in and around the Potomac River) to use in my projects.
I was pleasantly surprised by the way the pigment distributed itself. I didn’t get any snapshots, but I really just drizzled the pigments one at a time into the clear resin base (still tacky and not cured, but it had been sitting for probably 20 minutes). They went from squiggly / ropey designs to this! I poured some of it a bit too close to the shells, but overall I’m really happy with how the pigment looks (at least from the underside). Adding a bit more clear resin at the edge of the pigmented resin helped keep it off the shells. I will let it cure overnight before I pour the next layer and add the sand.
I covered the molds with plastic lids to keep any dust out of the resin while it cures. Hopefully in a few days I will be able to pop them out of the molds and see how they look from the top, as the view in the molds is of the bottom of the coasters.