This is a fun effect I’ve used on a couple of dragons now. Since I just finished one of them up, I thought it would be the perfect time to share how to do it with you! This tutorial uses UV resin to create clear 3D droplets on your surface that look like water drops.

It’s important that it is UV resin, not epoxy resin, as the quick cure will allow for the resin to stay 3D and not flatten out as it cures. You can also create some gravity defying effects this way too!

Supplies:

• Your baked polymer piece (it needs to be baked as most UV resin can’t go in the oven)
• UV resin
• UV torch or lamp (both shown below)
• A sunny windowsill (UV resin will still cure on a cloudy day, it just takes much longer; not shown)

Step 1: Place your droplets

I like to add my droplets in sections, but this will depend on what you’re covering. If you’re adding droplets to a 2D surface, you could probably add them all at once. When you’re working with 3D objects and have to worry about how gravity is going to affect your droplets and where you’re going to be able to hold onto your piece while working, it may be best to work and cure droplets as you go.

For the purpose of this tutorial, I’m working with a 2D piece, so I’m placing all of the droplets at once. When I worked on my dragon (photo at the end of this post), I started on the tail fins, cured those, and then picked up my dragon and started working my way up the body toward the head, curing sections as I was either changing my hold on the dragon, or turning it around to add to a different part of the body.

Apply the droplets directly from the resin bottle, being careful to only squeeze out a little at a time. It’s easy to have too much come out, and you don’t want your water droplet to be overwhelming or run into surrounding droplets.

I like to variate the size of the droplets too so it adds a little more visual interest to the texture.

Step 2: Quick cure

Once I’ve finished up a section of resin droplets, I use the UV torch to do what I call a quick cure. This is essentially to set everything in place so that gravity doesn’t effect the droplets while you continue to work.

If you’re working in sections, repeat steps 1 and 2 until you’ve covered your surface. Your quick cured resin will probably still be tacky, therefore it will be susceptible to fingerprints and dust. If you plan on working on this over the course of several days, I recommend moving through all 3 steps in sections.

When I thought I was curing my resin thoroughly, it would remain quite tacky, even when I didn’t add anything into it. Turns out I wasn’t giving it enough time to cure. Instead of setting up a UV light over my piece for 10 or more minutes, I do a combination of curing utilizing the UV torch and natural UV light outside.

Step 3: Cure completely

In the previous step, you’re using the UV torch to quickly set the UV. Once you’re ready to set the whole thing aside, put your piece up in a windowsill where it’ll have exposure to sunlight. Even if it’s a cloudy day, your resin will still cure; it will need just need more time.

Depending on the weather, I usually set mine up for half an hour or so (or longer), work on something else, and come back to my piece.

There will be no tack at all to your resin—that’s when it is completely cured. If it is still tacky, leave it in your windowsill for more time.

I was experimenting with powder pigments, so I also had a pretty blue piece that I layered up with water droplets:

And because these are both sparkly, here’s a video to show you all of that holo 🙂 :

I wouldn’t want to forget about the little merdragon that inspired this tutorial either! I love how it turned out.