Okay, you guys, this one’s a little different… but I love it.

Let me explain here.

So, I saw this video on a Snapchat series about a month ago, and it was all about these amazing 3D koi fish painted on with this thing called “resin”. I thought they were so cool, and I looked further into it to see how a few different people (pretty much just on YouTube) did it… and then I was like, oh my gosh, I could do that!

So… I did!

I made one smaller painted fish before this one, and I posted that on my Instagram. But this one is the first I did for sale on my Etsy!

The process is actually really difficult to explain, and since I’m a visual learner anyway, I had to watch all those YouTube artists do it before I could understand what I was even looking at. But, if you’re curious and not a complete visual learner, here’s how I did it…

First of all, those white rocks in the bottom of the bowl are real. Everything else, though, is not. It’s all painted.

I had to pour multiple layers of resin (which I’ve learned is basically just like liquid glass/plastic, and it dries to look like thick, clear glass), and I painted different parts of the fish on the different layers once they were dry. I had to start with the first layer at the bottom, and then I worked layer by layer up after that. I think, all in all, I did about 4 layers for the fish itself, and then 2 or 3 extra for the green and brown “algae” spots that you see in the bowl, too. Since you can only looks into the bowl from the top, the stacked layers of the fish makes it look real and 3D!

If you didn’t understand that process at all (I didn’t, either), then I would suggest searching the resin layer painting process on YouTube!

Another interesting thing behind this piece is how I worked with the resin itself. Since I had never used resin before and had literally .0 knowledge of it, I just ran through the aisles of a Hobby Lobby in Wisconsin and grabbed the cheapest “resin” bottle I could find out. Then, only before I opened it did I actually look up what resin is and how to use it, I found that there are 2 types of it… there’s the “safe”, “non-toxic”, nearly chemical-free kind… and then there’s the super toxic, chemically-infused one– the one that I got!

So, actually, the kind of resin that I got (called ‘polyester resin’; the other, generally safe kind is ‘epoxy resin’) put off fumes that stank to the high heavens as soon as I opened it. Fumes that, of course, were probably going to give me lung cancer if I breathed them in, so I wore a dust mask and protective eye goggles that I had gotten for chemistry class a few years ago. I mean, the mask was actually just from my dad’s woodworking shop in the basement, not from chemistry class, and I think I needed something more like one of those total gas masks the actors in the HBO Chernobyl mini-series were wearing.

But, don’t you just love the results?

Oh, yeah. Worth it.

So, this piece is cleverly called “Everything’s Betta in Blue!”, and like I said, it’s available for sale on Etsy! It also qualifies for a 15% off discount if you use coupon code BLOG15 at checkout!

Let me know what you guys think/thought of this… pretty unique piece!

–Kari