Heatopher: Best Of
This content will presumably change soon enough, once I finish all these websites and get back to work on this stuff! For the time being, I'm just including here a few pics of my favourite creations so far, without any contextualisation at this point, sorry.
There's plenty of overlap here with a couple of the other popups, but that as well will change over time. As things develop, I will no doubt dedicate at least one standalone page to this, but I'll leave it at a popup for the time being.
The Eye of Jupiter
I suppose that it doesn't really look like the Eye of Jupiter, but it was my first moment of understand the amazing fluid quality of epoxy resin, so I'm sticking with that title. Ultimately this is something and nothing. I’m not sure exactly how this happened, but I ended up with a very small extra piece of scaffold-board – some kind of offcut - at the time that I was working on my baroque bench, at the end of 2021.
A measure of the quality of material that we were provided with on that course (follow the link for more on that) was that I had to scoop out a load of rotten wood from that piece of scaffolding before thinking about doing anything with it. This meant that there was a fairly deep cavity in the board before I started playing with it. I’m not sure exactly what I intended to make out of it before I started pouring epoxy. I think I was only experimenting, with no practical goal. So what happened here was a wonderful happy accident.
One of the very first things that any beginner needs to learn about epoxy resin is just how essential it is to prepare everything very carefully before you begin, because there’s no way to control the process once things start leaking or it starts to go wrong in some other way that you didn’t foresee. The other thing that you need to learn about is BUBBLES. Two-part epoxy resin cures by means of an exothermic reaction; and if it’s been mixed too vigorously or if the environment is too warm, the process will be sped up too much. Sometimes it can be extremely dramatic, and you just get an epoxy brick which cures in the mixing jar. I think I’ve wisened up to that by now, but I’m not going to say that it’s never going to happen to me again.
When you get that excess heat, you get a lot of bubbles. Mostly it’s of course NOT what you want, but in this particular case the bubbles created something magical. Because that area of the board that I had scooped out was quite deep, there was enough depth of resin to produce excess heat, which is why the resin kept bubbling up from there for at least half an hour, according to my memory. And thanks to the fact that I had added several colours, I ended up with something pretty cool. For me it’s like a flower in bloom, but you decide what it makes you feel.
It doesn’t always work out like that. How great it would be if something so serendipitous happened every time.
Swirls
Swirls – that’s the theme. That’s what working with epoxy resin is all about – trying to create an attractive, and hopefully even majestic pattern. Sometimes you try too hard, and it doesn’t work out. The best patterns tend to emerge when you do the minimum and let the epoxy do the rest. Here is just a selection of some of the best swirly patterns that I’ve been lucky enough to create so far.
This one is mentioned elsewhere. It’s on one of the legs of the bench which I made in late 2021, and then coated with crazy layers of epoxy resin like a toffee apple. The other leg was the first attempt, which didn’t turn out so beautiful, precisely because I was still trying to do too much. Pictures of that on request only, and with agreement not to propagate them too much :~)
Here’s the pattern for which I coined the delightful title of alien vomit. This comes from my worktop project, which you can find out much more about here. As I said there, I don’t want to give too much away about how I created that crazy pattern. I’m sure that there are a few resin artists out there who have an idea, though ;-)
This is a pattern of colours which I think of as some kind of optimistic winter, detailed here from a stepladder-planter project which is still work in progress, due to be completed by…… 2027? Who knows? I haven’t actually worked on it for more than a year, which is why you can read more about it on the projects page. I’ll have another crack at it eventually, sure enough, ONCE I GET THESE WEBSITES DONE.
Finally (for now), this is the back of a chessboard. Find out more about them here. A discerning viewer should be able to tell that it’s not of course epoxy resin. It’s actually jesmonite, which works on similar principles, except that you’re mixing powder with liquid, not two liquids, and that the curing time is dramatically shorter than epoxy resin. What I like about this one is that you can actually see all kinds of ghostly forms if you turn it around. Have a go yourself. Not the same on a computer or phone as in real life, but anyway give it a go.
Chess
There is already a whole page on the site devoted to this (and eventually I might even make a whole site for them), so if you’re interested to find out more, go ahead and redirect yourself to there. The only purpose of mentioning these chessboards here is simply to point out that I do make them, and they’re not any old chessboards. I’m using embedded LED lighting, AND glow in the dark materials. I think that they’re pretty cool. That’s all. Have a look at the pictures, and go to the devoted page for more.
Miscellaneous Pretty Things
As with the chess sets, there’s a whole page devoted to these, so I’m only using this space to show some of the nicest trinkets that I’ve made.
