How to Add Opaque Pigments to 2-Part Resin by Becky Nunn

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Note: This audio transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate.
Hi this is Becky Nunn from Nunn Design, guest designer for Beadaholique.com Today we're going to be working on creating a piece using opaque pigments and a two-part epoxy resin. This allows you to add colorants. In this case the opaque pigments and create fun vibrant colors within flat tags and bezels. What you need for this project are some bezels and flat tags. Whatever you want to fill or cover, a stir stick. I actually have a couple of other little stir sticks I just picked up at my local coffee shop and cut them in half and that's for mixing the pigments. Some toothpicks, I have already poured a one to one ratio of the two-part epoxy resin ready for us to go you'll need to have some cups and some color pigment. I also have some business cards I'll be using this to transfer my images around easily, some sort of way in which to time yourself a pile of wet wipes Always nice to have those handy and also some gloves when working with two-part resin you're gonna want to look carefully at the manufacturer's instructions. Some basics are making sure your work surface is covered. I laid down a garbage bag. You also want to make sure that you have gloves that you doing on your hands and work in a well-ventilated area I also use glasses when I'm working with the resin just to prevent any kind of chemicals possibly getting into my eyes First I went ahead and poured equal quantities. I did half a fluid ounce of part A and half a fluid ounce of part B in my cup. You can watch other Beadaholique.com videos showing how to mix your resin. The first two minutes which I have timed myself on my cell phone, I set my alarm there for two minutes will be mixing the resin. My cup is very full because I have one full fluid ounce and I'm just going ahead and scraping the sides and blending the two parts together. You want to do this for a full two minutes Once your alarm has gone off and you've mixed it for 2 minutes and you're scraping the sides thoroughly, you're going to want to scrape off the sides and then I had a light right here and I'm going to go ahead and turn it on and place it under the light and like it sit for another five minutes timing that on my cell phone. Once your resin has set for a full 5 minutes and you've let all the air bubbles come to the surface and pop, you want to transfer the mixed resin into smaller size cups. If you're working with a lot of different colors you can pour multiple cups I'm just gonna work with red and the white pigments. As you can see I've put a piece of parchment down onto a cookie sheet and I've laid some business cards and then put my embellishments on top of there. One of the reasons I did that is this allows me to move my parts and pieces around easily once I have them set up because I'm not gonna want to bump them or move them about too much because the resin could spill off the edges also I typically work on a fairly small work surface so this allows me to put them aside someplace while I'm working on other projects Once I have my mixed resin inside of the cups just go ahead and you can choose which of the colors you want. I'm going to start with the white I just gonna add a little bit the pigment into the resin and then using one of my stir sticks and stir it fully and depending on how opaque you want the pigments to be. You can add more or less the pigments into the resin then I'm going to just drizzle the resin right into the bezels I've had great luck with using the two-part resin and colorants in regards to bubbles very few bubbles, so depending on how full you want your piece to be you can add it just to the surface or you can add more and dome it up. This is a natural doming resin. So once it gets to the side edges it just wants to know where that side edge is and then it'll automatically stop and start to dome itself by wicking up. See how I'm just adding a couple extra drops onto the top surface to move to the sides and stop we're gonna want to make sure we don't bump it too much as we're gonna go about this. I'm actually going to flip this one over. I want that flat surface on these ones because I want that flat surface there and drizzle it along the edges. If you feel more comfortable you can use a toothpick instead of this stir stick. Pretty cool huh? it's just sitting right on those edges and in some areas where you want to make sure that you have less such as around where I'm gonna be pouring near the loop right here, I want to make sure that I don't get the resin in the loop I might want to switch over and work with my toothpick to move the resin into place that way I won't get the resin up inside there if you get too much in one area you can just pull it and move it to where you want you might want to start with easier surfaces and then try a round surface like that later once you get the hang of it but it's great just for pouring right into a bezel. Once you have your resin poured inside the bezels that you have completed you'll want to go ahead and put a little plastic cup over-the-top of your pieces this allows for any kind of dust from getting into there. This one might be a little bit of a challenge Now my pieces are kitty cat hair free and dust free. This is the portion of the video where it's the Becky Nunn dog and pony show and this is where I show examples of other pieces that I make using this technique. This one you saw in the opening and that flat tag that we did like this, I just dropped it inside of a bezel, then in here it would be like a little mini tag that we worked on. Here's what the colorants would look like when mixing with copper and I do a lot of pieces on that flat tag and drop it into the different sizes that the bezels fit and you can also start to get creative in your color combinations of how to mix different colors with the different pigments like mixing the white and the Red together to create a pink and you can also just pour some over. This is a flat tag and an embellishment, this brass and just poured some of the color over-the-top of that to create a look like this and you can finish it off just by adding on a simple cord and just a single piece to make something like this. This is Becky Nunn for Beadaholique.com and I hope you've enjoyed learning how to use pigments with two part resin. Go to www.beadaholique.com to purchase beading supplies and to get design ideas!