ICE Resin® Vs UTEE {by Lin Brown}

2017 Topic 6: Resin

Lin Brown has always been a dab hand with UTEE and used to teach amazing classes in her shop where UTEE focal points were incorporated into her amazing metal work pieces. Tonight you get a taste of that! What a treat! And not one, but 2 resins!

 

Hello....Lin Brown from Yoursartfully here. It's always an absolute pleasure to have a guest spot on the PaperArtsy blog and tonight I'd like to share a little experiment I did to see whether  ICE Resin® or UTEE would be the best product for the project I had in mind.

I had two things on my "To Do" list recently, one of these was to create a project for this blog post and the second was to make a gift for a dear friend of mine. I decided it might be fun to combine both and check them both off my list in one go!! I am pleased to say that my friend has already received her gift, so it's perfectly OK for me to share it here with you lovely creative folks.

Many of you may remember that I used to use a lot of copper in my artwork and one of the techniques I cooked up way back then, was combining my metalwork and UTEE (click here to see the original blog post). The original post shows a more in depth, step-by-step project, the purpose of my post this evening was to establish which product would give me the best results for the project I have in mind.

ICE Resin® is a two part, jewellers grade, epoxy resin. It is self levelling and after curing, it is crystal clear.

UTEE stands for Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel and the name is pretty self explanatory, It melts just like regular embossing powder but the crystals look more like chunky sugar crystals.This can be melted in a Melt Pot and poured into moulds to create 3D embellishments.

I knew that I wanted to incorporate some of Seth Apter's fabulous wood chips and stamps but I didn't really know if I wanted them covered in either ICE Resin® or UTEE or if indeed they should remain as stamped, raw wood. 

ESA03

 

Wood Chips

Having made a few samples, I tested the tag shaped Wood Chip with a covering of UTEE and immediately knew that I preferred it without any products on it at all. The image beneath the UTEE appeared blurry and I felt that the matt finish of the Wood Chip was a good contrast against the other shiny embellishments I had made.

The sample on the left is a bezel filled with ICE Resin®, the one on the right is UTEE. I know that the ICE Resin® sample is a more interesting one as it has other embellishments embedded in it (I totally forgot to put them in the UTEE sample!!!)  but I think you will agree that the ICE Resin® one shows the detail of my skeleton leaf stamp from ELB31 so beautifully, that ICE Resin® wins hands down on that score. Having said that, I do love the amber glow that can be achieved with UTEE. If I were to create projects like this again and used images with less detail, i would seriously consider using UTEE as it really does look like amber. This is achieved by leaving the clear UTEE in the Melt Pot for a while, it develops the most gorgeous amber glow.

Above are a couple of close up shots so that you can compare the two samples. My lovely friend Sally received the top sample which is the ICE Resin® one, I just love the way you can see every teeny tiny detail of everything inside the bezel....perfect for this small wall hanging. 

The last thing that I would like to point out is in favour of UTEE. If you look closely at the UTEE sample, you may just be able to see that it has a slight domed effect to it which is totally different from ICE Resin®.

In conclusion, which product do I prefer? For this project, definitely ICE Resin® but I do actually love both of these awesome products.

Thank you for joining me this evening, I'd love to hear your thoughts on both of these amazing products.

Lin

Yoursartfully (Blog)

I bet Sally was beyond excited to receive that gorgeous piece!! And i agree the wood makes a fantastic contrast! Thanks for sharing these wonderful ideas Lin, I'm sure these products are going to stay around for a long time, they are so versatile and useful for crafting. ~Leandra

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