Resin experiments begin

As I continue my studio experimentation, I turned to resin for sealing prints and as a possible top coat for fabric collage.  I also have seen some interesting marbling done with resin so that was also on my list.  So, I created 3 pieces to try out with a resin top:  a small dancer collage that I had in my to be finished up drawer, a piece with a photo of Audubon's Great Blue Heron with some various tested fabrics, and a board covered with gold ground that I would marble on.  Various searches on the internet told me that fabric may or may not darken when resin is poured on top and one way to test is to dip the fabric in water.  If it doesn't darken, the resin shouldn't darken it either.  So I tested a variety of green fabrics and put scraps of them on the piece with the photo.

The results were informative.  All of the fabric darkened.  I suspect this is because I prewash my fabrics so I removed the sizing that is on them when they are bought.  Clearly, first thing to test in the next batch of tests is whether a sealant on the fabric will keep them from darkening.  Here's the fabric collage piece, 6" square, and it's almost impossible to see the color of the L shaped cloud piece the dancer is on.

Unfortunately, I didn't take a photo of the entire piece before putting the resin on but I do have photos of the background fabric and the dancer element separately so you can see how much darkening has occurred.

As is obvious, the background fabric is seriously darker and greener which totally ruins the look of the piece.  And then there's the dancer element which loses all the subtle color variations.  Totally unhappy artist with this piece.

The heron photo with the green fabric scraps did somewhat better.  The photo and the marbled fabric along the bottom retained their colors and clarity.  So big win on using the resin for photos and a more work required result for the marbled fabric.  It's not obvious in the photo but the fabric scraps and the marbled fabric on this one floated up a bit in the resin and some stick out the top.  This can be dealt with by better glueing them down to begin with or by putting a second coat of resin on top.

        The green fabric scraps scattered around all passed the water test but darkened considerably so definitely a sealant test on fabric in my future.

And then the most successful of the 3 initial tests:  marbling on a board.  The colors worked well, the resin lost a tiny bit of marbling detail over time and except for the massive dripping off the bottom right corner, things were generally better than I expected.  I'll be doing much more of this type of thing in the future along with a couple of tests of taping the edges to stop the dripping off the sides.

I'm looking forward to working with the resin and I am absolutely happy with it as an alternative to acrylics for a topcoat on prints.  We'll see with the next round of experiments how many other places I can use it in my studio.