Behind the Studio
Ask what surprises visitors most about a resin studio and the answer is nearly always the colour shelf. People expect paint. What they find instead is stranger and more beautiful: jars of shimmer that look like crushed jewellery, ink bottles that bloom like weather when they touch resin, and dense little tubs of paste that pour like honey. Colour in resin is not applied to a surface — it lives inside the material, suspended in three dimensions. Getting it there, and getting it to stay where you put it, is half the craft. Here is how it actually works.
Almost everything a resin artist does with colour comes from three families of colourant, and each behaves completely differently inside a pour.
Mica is a natural mineral milled to a fine powder and coated to catch light. Stirred into clear resin, it does not simply tint the mix — it fills it with millions of microscopic reflective plates that shift and glow as you move around the finished piece. That deep, drifting lustre you see in a good resin tray — the sense that the colour is moving under the surface — that is mica doing its work.
Micas are forgiving, stable and rich, which makes them the backbone of most work. Their one personality trait to manage: the particles are heavier than resin, so in a slow-curing deep pour they can gently settle, concentrating shimmer toward the bottom. Knowing when that settling will flatter a piece and when it will fight it is pure experience.
Alcohol inks are dyes in a fast-evaporating carrier, and they are the least obedient thing in the studio. Dropped into resin, they do not blend — they bloom, pushing outward in petals and tendrils that no two pours ever repeat. The famous "petri" effect — those otherworldly blossoms suspended in a clear block — is alcohol ink sinking through resin, chased downward by a drop of opaque white.
Inks reward nerve and punish hesitation. They are also the reason we tell clients that pieces relying on ink effects can be matched in palette and spirit, never duplicated stroke for stroke. That is not a limitation; it is a signature.
Pastes are concentrated pigment ground into a thick base, and they do the structural work of a palette: solid colour fields, crisp geode bands, the dense white that becomes a wave. Where mica shimmers and ink wanders, paste simply states a colour and holds it. A few grams tint a large pour; overdo it and the excess pigment can interfere with the cure itself, which is why colour is always weighed, never eyeballed, on anything that matters.
No effect gets requested more often than the ocean — and no effect is more misunderstood. A convincing resin seascape is not painted. It is layered, and each layer has a job:
The depths. The first pours are the darkest — deep navy and teal pastes, sometimes over a sand-textured base — because a real ocean is darkest farthest from shore.
The shallows. Successive layers step lighter: turquoise, aqua, seafoam, often with a translucent tint so light passes through and the colours stack optically, the way real water does over sand.
The wave. The white is the trick everyone asks about. A line of white paste is laid where the surf should break, then worked with a small flame or heated air. The heat thins the resin and drives the white across the surface in fine branching cells — the lacework of a real wave, created by physics rather than a brush.
You do not paint a wave in resin. You create the conditions for one, and then it happens.
Timing rules everything here. Pull the wave too early and it dissolves into the layer below; too late and it sits stiff on the surface like icing. The window is minutes wide, it shifts with the weather, and hitting it consistently is the difference between an ocean and a blue smear. It is also why ocean pieces — from serving platters to full tabletops — are built over multiple sessions across multiple days: each depth of water is its own pour, and each pour must reach the right stage before the next arrives.
Clients sometimes send a photograph of an earlier piece and ask for "exactly that". We can come honestly close — the palette is recorded, the pigments are weighed, the layer order is known. But resin colour is the product of pigment plus movement, heat, timing and the small turbulence of a hand pour. The cells land where they land. The ink blooms where it blooms.
Mass production solves this by eliminating the variables — and with them, everything alive about the surface. A hand-poured piece solves it differently: by letting the variation be the point. Two trays from the same palette are siblings, not clones, and the one on your table exists nowhere else on earth.
Because colour carries so much of a commission, the first conversation always digs past the colour name. Navy like a midnight sky, or navy like deep water? Shimmer or matte? Should the gold sit in thin veins or drift through like dust? For a custom commission we will often mix a small sample palette and photograph it cured, in daylight, before a drop touches the final mould — because pigment in the jar, resin wet, and resin cured are three different colours, and only the last one matters.
If you are dreaming in a particular palette — an ocean for your coffee table, a sunset for a vanity tray, a single perfect emerald for a set of coasters — the pigment shelf is ready. Bring us the feeling; we will find the formula.
Have a palette in your head? Send us a reference photo on WhatsApp at +91 7096036250 and we'll tell you exactly how we'd build it in resin.
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Every piece in the journal began as someone's idea. Tell us yours — colours, keepsakes, occasions — and we'll pour it to order.
2 March 2026 · 5 min read