 Can I get a matte finish with Art Resin? You can indeed get a matte finish from Art Resin. It was formulated to have a high gloss finish, however, we do have a tutorial to teach you how to take that high gloss into a nice matte finish. Take a look. Hey there, Joanne and Jasmine here from Art Resin. Now, we all know and love the beautiful high gloss finish that Art Resin gives to your artwork. But what if you want the protection that Art Resin gives your art and that beautiful color enhancement that it gives, but you don't necessarily want that high gloss finish. You want more of a matte finish. Well, Jasmine and I have been doing a little experimenting and today we're going to walk you through step by step how to do it. So Jasmine's been busy preparing lots of artwork here to show how to get the matte finish, so she's going to walk us through step by step. Yeah, so here's what a piece looks like. This half and a half down here you see the glossy part that's Art Resin and you can see this side also as Art Resin on it, but I've mattified it. It has a different effect. And I did this piece a long time ago and I left it glossy, but just this week I decided I'd make it matte and I really like how it turned out. I think it gives it just a different feel. You know, it's kind of natural looking, but you still get that hard Art Resin protection on it. Exactly. And this is a technique too. You can use on your art or you can use it on wood as well, because it works beautifully for wood. Okay Jasmine, so the first step obviously is to resin your artwork. Now because we're going to be sanding, do you think one coat is enough or would you put two coats of resin on? So for this project we're going to be using really fine grit sandpaper because we're not really taking a lot off the top, so we can do one coat or you can do two if you felt like it. Perfect. Okay, and what supplies do we need today? So over here I have three different grits of sandpaper and we have our water bottle because we're going to be doing wet sanding. When I was experimenting I did some dry sanding and I did some wet sanding, but I found that the wet sanding gave a really nice or smoother finish because if you were here in real life you'd be able to see that there's these little tiny scratch marks on the dry side. And the wet kind of just helps to carry those little particles away so they don't scratch your piece up. What we have is our water and some lint-free cloths for that process. And to finish our pieces off we're going to be using the tum oil and cutting board wax and we'll show you how that works when we get there. Perfect. And the last piece of equipment that we need is a dust mask. So anytime you're going to be sanding resin you definitely want to be wearing a dust mask so you're not breathing in any particles. So to sand these pieces down for a small piece hand sanding is absolutely perfect but if you've got a larger piece you probably want to use an electric sander. So we're going to be showing you both ways. Alrighty. Okay. Yep. Masks on. Let's get started. Alright so let's get started. I'm going to start with a 320 grit here and I'm just going to do this side of the piece so we can see the difference at the end. Here we go. We're starting with 320 which is a fairly fine grit. The higher the number the finer the grit is. So we're not doing something low like an 80 or a 100 even because you're going to end up scratching up your piece too much and it's going to take forever to try and polish all that off and you just don't need it for this technique. So start with your water. Give her a good spray. You kind of want to get your sandpaper pretty wet for this so you're going to hold it and start working it in small circles around when you're wet sanding like this. Takes a bit of elbow grease. So you get little circles all the way around. You want to get everywhere. So you're going to try and work it up to like a gritty paste. So we're finally coming to see this paste that I was talking about. You can see it looks a bit like toothpaste now. Once that paste that you see forming gets too dry that you wet it thoroughly and you wipe it off with your cloth. Don't be afraid to like really saturate it. You do want to work really wet for this and then you can start the process again by wetting your piece, wetting your sandpaper if you like and starting to sand again. So I'm sanding with 320 still and I'm sanding until I see that they're absolutely everywhere until they're even across the entire piece that I'm doing. So you're basically trying to get it as even as you can with each level of grit that you're using. Okay so now I'm going to go on to our 600 grit which is the second highest that I'm using today. So then I like to keep sanding until I have it as even as I could possibly get it with the 600 before I move on to an even higher grit. See here we're working right now with like a pretty good level of paste. You don't want it to get too much more dry or stickier than that because that's when you start dragging the like micro particles across the resin and that's when you get the kind of gouges, the little tiny gouges. So this is good, not much thicker than this. Now we've done our 600 grit. We can move on to our 1500 grit which is, it's almost like a polishing grit. You're not going to like feel a lot to it but you know it just helps to finish it off really. You can get any little snaggles that are left. As you're going let it get dry and that's when you're going to be able to see your matte effect and you can you know you can assess whether you need to go back to a grit before or if you've done a good job and you're happy with it. Then just work it until it's as tight as you can get it so you don't want to see any large scratches appearing from the 600 or the 300 and that's how you're going to buff it up with this and it can take a bit of time but it looks really nice at the end. Alrighty so I finished sanding this and now we'll just get to the last step. So I'm going to use cutting board wax just to polish it off. So here we're going to work the wax in. It takes a little bit of elbow grease again. We're just going around in little circles just like how we were sanding. And what this is doing is it's working the wax into the teeny teeny tiny microscopic little scratches that we've created on the surface of this piece and that's what gives it its matte look. And working the wax in it's not going to bring the shine back. It's just going to give it a really nice finished look on your matte piece. So now you're going to take your clean cloth that doesn't have any wax on it and you're going to keep it quite fluffy in your hand and you're just going to wax off and this is just going to take any thick layers of wax that are sitting on top of the piece that haven't worked themselves into the little scratches that you've made. And once that's done you can repeat the process if you want to or you can call it good. And there you have it. You have a matte finish on your art resin piece. So with the electric sanding it's pretty much exactly the same process. So you're going to be making your way from 320 grit up to 600 grit up to 1500 grit and in between each grit you're going to be spritzing it down with water and then wiping it dry and then spritzing with water wiping it dry you're going to repeat that probably three or four times per grit. So don't forget to hold your piece up to the light to make sure you haven't missed any spots with the sander especially pay attention to the edges. Alright I'm back. I'm finished sanding my piece with the electric sander. I wish you could feel how soft this is. It's absolutely beautiful. So it's got a great matte finish and my last step now is just to finish it off. So you can use an oil, you can use a wax. This tongue oil here actually has kind of a brownish color so I would probably reserve this for wood rather than a piece of artwork but it's up to you. I'm going to use this cutting board wax. You can use furniture wax as well. I like the cutting board wax because it is for cutting boards I know it's non-toxic and we're all about non-toxic here at Art Resin so this is what I'm going to use. I've got my lint-free cloth here okay so I'm just going to wipe in on my cloth and then very gently rub it in. So we're just going to keep rubbing it in until we get the matte finish that we're looking for. I love too using this cutting board wax because it allows you to have a matte finish without using anything really toxic. Usually matting agents are solvents, they're super toxic and that's why we don't recommend adding them to Art Resin or finishing your piece with them but something like a cutting board wax is absolutely non-toxic. Alright I think I'm done. So you can see the difference here between the matte side and the glossy side. Hopefully you can pick that up. They look fantastic. They both look fantastic so there you go two different options for an Art Resin finish. Alright that's it. I think they turned out really great too and yours looks super soft and buttery. Thank you and yours looks fantastic as well. Thanks. Well I hope you enjoyed learning how to do a matte finish. Remember you can do it on your artwork, you can do it on wood as well and one of the great advantages actually to using it on wood and matte finish on wood if you have something like a tabletop. It makes it a little more scratch resistant. The matte finish kind of hides the scratches a little bit more so that's a handy tip for doing a table with wood. So whether you choose a matte finish or a glossy finish, Art Resin makes your artwork look amazing.