Making a Primavera Part 2: Icy Resin Coat

While waiting for my art metal clay to arrive I was thinking two things

1. that if I do get the art metal clay to work, it'll be REALLY expensive to do per clip.  Roughly, I think I'll need 20g of silver metal clay per clip, which is $60 + shipping on top of a $44 clip.  So that's already clearing $100 in materials, to say nothing of time, consumables and whatever else that'll entail.  And that's assuming it works at all
2. I was really antsy to try out my new mold.

When I coat the the other Ficcares I make I use a compouned called Ice Resin.  It takes 8-13 hours to set and 3 days to cure.  It's a pain to work with, but dries crystal-clear, hard, and doesn't yellow.   I wondered, since metal clay will shrink when I fire it, if perhaps I could make an Ice Resin topper that I could then epoxy down / paint silver (not sure which order is best yet). 

So while I was working on a bunch of custom orders on Saturday I mixed up some Ice Resin and loaded it into the mold.  Because it takes so flipping long to set I had to keep tilting the mold back and forth to distrbute the resin as it set up.  Thankfully the longer this went on the thicker it got, and the less I had to tip. 

But here we were:

It was very thin and I took it out carefully, mostly worried I'd ruined the mold that had taken so long to make.

 

And then set it atop a blank clip I had to finish curing.

 

 

 

It still needs to finish the curing process, but it's hardening up nicely.  Then I can clean up the edges and see what there is to see.  As it stands, though, I do think it's pretty this way.  It has a frosted glass look to it that I think has a unique amount of depth to it.

 

I'm not sure about the best way to paint it silver and then secure it down on a clip.  An antiqued/colored look might be best because I think I'm going to lose the textured recesses with a bit of primer and paint.  But we'll see.

 

In any event, this is shaping up to be a much more cost-reasonable approach than the silver art clay, and at least let me prove to myself that my mold works as desired!