My love of (and history with) Resin

As a kid, my dad was using resin to make cool stuff. I was always in the work room with him, watching what he was doing. We started to make paper weights, and eventually jewelry with resin. I had my whole family involved. They brought me random junk, and old jewelry, that we broke apart and then filled the resin molds with the pieces. You can see a few examples in the photos.

Then a few years ago, I came back to the idea of using resin in mixed media art. Some examples of those pieces are pictured below. I loved going out and scouring junk stores for all the goodies that would make up the pieces. It was always interesting to see how the different papers and items would react to the resin. The vintage monopoly cards. shown below, really soaked it up!

Now I prefer to focus on using left-over bits of paint and paper in my resin blocks. Resin is such a tricky medium; if you are off just a bit on measuring one or the other parts of the mixture it won't ever set properly. But when you get it right, the results are amazing! The new resin I use today doesn't yellow with age like the resin used for the paperweights did. 20 years leads to some good improvements. Stay tuned for more on my most recent process in making resin covered mixed media art.