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This post touches on some improvements to my resin fill method. I also test a second type of resin fill where I just fill/flood and engrave. Let’s start there. For these Harry Potter crests, I didn’t create the artwork, I found something online. I have no intention of selling these for that reason, but they worked well for testing this technique.

PART I:
Here I’ll show how to fill an engrave with resin. I cut and engraved the small crests, and left the masking on.

Mixing up the resin with gold mica pigment
Don’t overdo it. If you use too much it’ll be hard to weed the masking later.
After flooding all of the designs I tried to scrape back as much as possible. You don’t want overfilled wells. You’ll see the negative consequences below.

The steps for this process are the same as in my previous post. Essentially fill the engraves, scrape back as much as possible, and then torch the resin to remove bubbles. Let the designs sit from between 10 minutes and 2 hours and then weed the masking. It somehow slipped my mind that these designs were not one contiguous piece of masking so I had to take a needle to pull up the little details which was tedious.

On occasion I had a little spillage when weeding.
A Q-tip with alcohol can be used to remove any wet resin from the wood.
Finally here are the weeded designs as they dry.
This design had some issues – you can see the bleeding around the eyes and fine details
The Slytherin design was a bit overfilled as well – see how I fix that below.
No issues with Ravenclaw.
Hufflepuff also came out well

In order to fix the overfilling on the Slytherin and Gryffindor designs I sanded them down by working them in circles on 120 grit sandpaper.

After sanding I cleaned them with alcohol and coated them with Polycrylic. Notice all the details around the snake’s mouth that are clearer here.

PART II:
For this section I’m going to tell you my amazing new discovery for getting SHINY backs on your resin “stained glass” designs. I’ll also touch on how I did a mother of pearl flake inlay. Ok so here is the trick – leave the masking on both sides of your design and then spay the back with Super 77 spray glue and apply it to a sheet of acetate. That’s it! That’s the secret. It works better than using tape as masking and it’s very easy. Just be warned the Super 77 is a VERY strong spray glue so spray it outside or be careful, it’ll get on everything. Burnish the back lightly and then proceed.

Spray glue the back and apply to acetate.
Now you’re ready to fill.
I added a bit of clear resin and then packed in some of the MOP flake. The flake will sink to the bottom once it settles.
After filling the engrave with MOP I mixed up some alcohol ink dye into the remaining resin and flooded the rest of the design. I used a throw away brush to move it around the design and keep it from flooding into the MOP moon.
After torching I removed the masking. Then I let it cure.
After curing I flipped it to the back and now you can see that it worked well. There was a very tiny bit of leeching (as seen by the blue) but the masking protected the wood.
It came off mostly clean. The rest was easy to peel off.
Notice the shiny, glossy back which matches the front.
Here you can compare the shiny back to the mat back produced by the tape masking.
The alcohol ink does cause very slight bleeding into the wood in some places, but I found that the mica pigments sometimes do this too.
The one advantage to using the alcohol ink is that you get a lovely translucence that lends itself to applications where light will shine through.

Obligatory code plug. If you found this post helpful and you plan to buy a Glowforge you can use my code for a discount: https://glowforge.us/r/QHDONFXB

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