 Welcome to another video. So I'm gonna show you some clips here. We're gonna cut away from what you see on the table right now to me making this and what is this and how cool does it look. All right so this is a Shannon Green custom keeper not unlike this one. This is another one I have that obviously is a smaller size. I decided after talking to Shannon and then later seeing her video to try something she'd been experimenting with and cover the cover of one of my custom keepers with resin. So here we're gonna cut away to the actual video where I'm doing this and the first thing I did with this custom keeper, once I got the elastic out of it and I took all the elastic off of it, I painted it with a coat of flat black acrylic paint. I did give it a light sanding before I did that and then wiped it with a damp cloth. I don't, according to Shannon you don't have to do that. I figured it wouldn't hurt anything so I did it anyway. I covered it with a coating of flat black paint. You can use any brand that you want that you have. I use Masters Touch which is a sort of a generic brand and just something that will cover the custom keeper and give you a mostly solid colored surface to work on. Once that was mostly dry, I mixed up some white acrylic paint with a little bit of iridescent medium which I happened to have by Liquitex and some water and thinned it out just enough that I could do splatters on the black paint. Now if you have a, you want to just use white flat paint that you have or you want to use, maybe you have a pearl colored metallic paint. Use that. Use what you have and with some of the larger splatters you can tell that I took a damp paint brush and I sort of moved the paint around. It blended a little bit with the parts of the black paint that weren't completely dry. I got a little bit of gray tones and that was okay. That was fine with what I was going for in case you haven't guessed. I really wanted to do something that was galaxy-esque sort of. That's what I was shooting for anyway. So once I had the white ones on there, I was going to leave it and let it dry and then I really looked at it and thought, you know, I'm going to do something else. So I took out some gold metallic paint. I used PBO. I got out a gold metallic pigment powder. I had the Schmincke rich gold powder and I mixed them together. There was a little bit of water in the dish. I mixed them in. I didn't add any extra other than what was in there. It was made it just thin enough to let me splatter some of that on it also. I did get a couple of like chunky bits in there which I picked out but that was okay. And then I had to let that dry completely. Now I will admit I helped it along a little bit at certain times with the heat gun but you really don't want to do that too much. You really want your paint to stay flat for pouring the resin. I didn't want it to bumpy which is funny saying that because yeah we'll get to that. So once that is completely dry because you are going to have to push the resin around on the custom keeper so you want the underlying paint to be completely completely dry. Once that's dry you're going to mix up your resin per your instructions for whatever resin brand you have. Now I'm going to link Shannon's video in the description below. She used Clearcast. I am out of Clearcast but I had Easycast which is a different kind of resin. They're both epoxy resins. According to Shannon there was nothing special about the resin she used that kept the custom keeper flexible other than not putting too much resin on the custom keeper. It's the only thing she did. So that being said I thought I would try what I have. So I mixed up some Easycast resin. I got out a few colors of alcohol ink including a white alcohol ink, a white opaque alcohol ink. I had printed some of my artwork on printable transparency sheets and I took one of those that I thought was interesting and I roughly painted the back of it with white paint. I wasn't trying to completely cover it. I just wanted to mostly cover it. Then I cut it into some round shapes. I'll explain why I did that that way in just a minute. Then you want to take your custom keeper and you want to flip it over to the back side and you want to really tape it down a lot better than I did. I did not do a great job at this part. I really should have taken more time with it and I should have used a different kind of tape which I didn't do. I used painter's tape. I really would advise something like artist tape or masking tape. Something that's really going to stick better because what I used did not stick very well and I did get some resin leakage under the edges of the tape on the back side. Now while I'm okay with that and I also had some paper that stuck to the back side while I'm not necessarily mad at that if I had it to do over again would I have done it differently? Yeah I would have. As we're speaking and I'm doing this voice over, I'm trying to pick the paper off the back side by the way. So tape the edges really well so that you don't get your resin leaking under to the back of your custom keeper cover unless of course you plan on covering the inside with collage or paint later. I wouldn't recommend doing resin on both sides. I do think that will make your custom keeper too stiff and make it so that when you try to bend it and use it as a journal cover that it's going to crack so I wouldn't really recommend doing that. Once you have it all taped you want to lay it face up back face up and you want to raise it up off your table a bit and onto like Dixie cups or something and you also want to put paper plastic or other nonstick material underneath it something to give the resin to drip on so it doesn't stick to your table or whatever surface you're working on. Make sure you're wearing gloves when you're doing any work with resin and take all precaution. Again Shannon's got some great tips in her video so I do recommend you go watch that. There's some great resin artists out there on YouTube that do great work and have lots of great ideas about how to work with resin. I would recommend that you watch some of them and I'll show you all what I'm doing in just a minute. So you want to wear gloves you may depending on the resin that you're using want to use a respirator. You want to make sure your table is covered and that you're working smart with your resin. Alright so once you're ready to start pouring the trick to pouring the resin on your cover is to do a really thin coat. Now I was really hesitant about doing too thick of a coat so I probably could actually have put a little bit more on here. On the surface I ended up with is uneven which is kind of the joke that I was going to let you guys clue you guys in on a little uneven. That's okay you know what I kind of like what happened with the cover and I could probably pour some more resin on it but I'm not going to. Okay so get your thin coat of resin on there smooth it out as best you can as flat as you can. Pop the bubbles in the resin now before you put the alcohol ink on there because the alcohol ink will catch fire and please don't do that. Very dangerous. So pop your bubbles in the clear resin before you start putting the alcohol ink in there at all. Before you also start putting the alcohol ink in there take your clear transparency and circles and push them into the resin and underneath the resin push some resin over the top of them. The reason I used the clear transparency printed with artwork with the white paint on the back is because if you did this with paper it would absorb the resin and it would not stay opaque and brilliant out against the black background which is what I wanted. The plastic is not going to absorb the resin. At the same time because it's a clear transparency I needed to opaque out some of the background so you could see the colors and pattern in the printed work. So those are my thoughts behind using plastic to embed to make planetary shapes in this galaxy background which worked out fabulous by the way. And I will include a little video at the end that I made for social media of me showing you the transparencies that I printed. I don't really show how I did it because that isn't really hard. I just got from Staples overhead transparency film that's intended for inkjet printers and printed one of my artwork files on it. I'll include that little video it's like a minute long at the end of this tutorial. Once you have your planets in there you've got your coat of resin on there. You've got about 12 hours until the resin cures. That's plenty of time to play around with your alcohol inks. So the way you do this is the same way that they do the Petri dish resin art here on YouTube. If you Google that and I'll try to remember to include a favorite couple of my links in the description but I start with the white alcohol ink just drops here and there then in the white I add the color then on that color I add some more white and the white makes the colors stand out and be opaque. And then I pushed them around a bit with I believe I used the popsicle stick that I stirred the resin with. I lifted it up and dripped it and moved it around blotted some of it with a damp baby wipe if it got a little bit too muddy and just kept working at it until I got something that I was really happy with. Then the trick is to leave it alone which is the hardest part to leave it alone for 12 hours and once you do that you can pull the tape off the back and I took all the cups and got rid of the cups and everything and now we're going to go back to the table where I am right now. This is what you end up with is about 12 hours later. It's very flexible as you see it's not cracking it's doing really well. I do have some nerfed up edges because like I said the tape I used I should have used different tapes so can you see where like the resin and ink snuck in underneath and here is where some of the paper stuck. I'm going to just though take this is a sanding block this is the kind you use here fingernails and I'm going to sand any rough spots. I did trim off a little bit of excess around the edges with a pair of scissors already. There were some spots where there were like blobs of resin overhanging the edge so you can just cut them off with scissors and then if you feel the need to use the sanding block that one's not happy doing this. Now again you probably could go over this and you could pour a second layer of resin on it to fill in any holes that you may have. I'm not going to do that. You want to keep it to a really thin coat. I probably used an ounce and a half of resin maybe two ounces no more than that. You'll have to experiment and play. This is like a brand new thing so we're all kind of winging it and because it's only about 12 hours and and the resin is still fresh I'm trying to keep it really clean. It'll be completely cured in 24 to 48 hours but it's cured enough to manipulate. I did use a straight edge this is really old and gross but to pull some of the paint off the back I mean the paper off the back and I just use plain scissors to trim the edges a bit. So the other thing that happened because I didn't use the right kind of tape on the back is that the resin filled in most of the holes. So you really do need to put the tape on the back not only to keep the blobs from the edges and also to keep it from you know going underneath the edges which it did online again I'm okay with it but also to keep from covering up the holes. The center hole is the only one that I can still see so I have to repunch the holes so I'm gonna have to try to repunch the holes. I'm gonna have to try to find the holes. I'm gonna just use my crocodile and just repunch the holes. The other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to change the color of the elastic. It comes with the custom keeper comes with the white elastic. I'm gonna change it to blue. Hopefully I'm getting these in kind of the right place. Don't do this make sure you do a good taping job. This is really kind of a pain in the neck. I think that's right. Hopefully that is because it's punch now. So before we do anything else now we're gonna rethread it and I don't remember how it's threaded. Shannon does send directions with her custom keepers and this is the tool insert by the way. I'm going to look at this one to see what she did. So this is the blue elastic I chose. Out of my stash of stuff looks like over here. Having issues with being fumble fingers today because evidently I've forgotten how to tie a knot. Okay pull that tight. I'm gonna get a couple of notebooks to put in here and the other thing I want to use out of the blue elastic is a loop to keep it closed. So the loop actually gets threaded through a center hole that's in the center of the spine of the cover. Probably be easier if I take the notebooks out but I'm lazy. You know the elastic is way easier to get out of the center hole than it is to get in the center hole. As soon as I turned the camera off I got the elastic out. Of course I did. Alright so then you can you can put at least for probably more notebooks in here and your tool keeper and they fit in here really comfortably and you can you can fit a lot of stuff in that tool keeper. I am loving this. So we have this galaxy printed custom keeper. Isn't that just isn't it pretty? And I can't even tell you how it feels and I honestly am kind of liking the bumps and divots in the custom keeper. Again it's not a super smooth pour on the resin but I'm okay with that. I will probably find myself doing this a lot and like wiping it off a lot. I can see me doing that because I just want it to be like I don't know clean all the time. But I really am loving it and I think you guys should give it a try and play with some of the resin on your custom keepers and if you don't have a custom keeper maybe you need one in your life because who wouldn't want this beautiful galaxy printed notebook cover. I will say that I took the rest of the resin because I had a little bit of leftover and I poured it out on a Teflon sheet. Shannon also shows how to do this in her video and I ended up with this piece of resin that I could cut up to make journal covers out of but I'm not sure if I want to do that. It just I mean look at that. I don't know exactly what I'm gonna do with it but I have some ideas. I don't know if it's gonna end up being a journal cover. It actually may end up being a piece of artwork on its own. So anyway there you have it. I hope that gives you some ideas of what you can do. Watch Shannon's video. I'll link a couple of other like resin basics videos in the description for you all. So go give them a watch and show them some love and if you want to play with resin just make sure you know what you're doing and that you take all precaution. That's it for today. Go out and play with your art. Make some great stuff and above all do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye guys.