Although we have already published a few articles going over thing such as the best resin dye alternatives, we have noticed more and more questions being asked about using resin for arts and crafts. Although we see a wide range of different questions being asked, today we are going to be focusing in on how to color resin with a transparent or translucent look.
Depending on what you are planning on doing with your resin work, the transparent dyes and effects can be a better option than the solid dyes. With translucent resins being a popular option we hope that our article will be able to help our readers dye their resin to the color that they want while keeping it transparent or translucent without having to break the bank.
We will be going over our recommended transparent resin dye that tends to offer the best performance followed by three popular transparent resin dye alternatives that you may be able to use. Although the alternatives do tend to offer slightly worse performance overall, they can be much cheaper than the official dyes helping to save some of our readers a little money.
On top of this, we are also presuming that our readers will be using a cheap but decent epoxy resin for their arts and crafts rather than a low-quality option. Although the low-quality resins work with the actual resin dyes well, they tend to struggle more when using with a transparent dye alternative.
How To Color Resin Transparent
In our opinion, commercial transparent resin dye will always be the best option if you are specifically trying to dye your resin to be either transparent or translucent as they have been specifically designed for this purpose and tend to offer you the best results. Thankfully, the prices of these high-quality dyes has came down by a large amount over the last few years meaning that most of our readers will be able to add them to their collection without breaking the bank.
You can also save more money by bulk purchasing them in packs with most of the packs containing at last sixteen different colors but there are some transparent resin dye packs that contain twenty colors. This should cover all base for the majority of our readers and ensure that you are able to dye your resin to be totally transparent or tint them with a color that is translucent.
If you are on a budget then this does tend to be one of the better options as although a commercial transparent resin dye pack tends to have a higher price tag than some of the alternatives below, they do tend to perform better with cheaper epoxy resin. In the grand scheme of things, you can usually save more money be going with a cheaper epoxy resin and paying a little more for your dye than paying less for your dye but having to go with a higher price point resin.
Taking Advantage Of Alcohol Ink As A Transparent Resin Dye
Using a cheap alcohol ink is probably going to be the best alternative to an actual resin dye if you do want your resin to be transparent or tinted with a translucent look to it. Due to many of our readers already being involved in arts and crafts, it is highly likely that a number of people reading this article will already have some alcohol ink in their home that they are able to use without having to purchase new materials too.
Alcohol ink tends to work very well with resin while also being translucent too. Resins of all qualities and price points tend to set normally with alcohol ink in them and they can act as an alternative to actual resin dye if needed. Alcohol ink also offers the advantage of their swirls that alcohol ink art is well known for and although this is not as profound in dried resin as it is on paper, you can still see the swirls if you use multiple colors.
As alcohol inks have been specifically designed for use with arts and crafts, the color range for the is huge too and it should be very easy for the majority of our readers to find the color or shade that they need for their work. If you do run into problems then you can often mix multiple colors to come up with the one that you want without having too many issues too scoring alcohol ink another point for use as a transparent resin dye alternative.
Using Kool-Aid As A Transparent Resin Dye
We have spoken about using No products found. as a way to dye your resin a few times as it is without a doubt one of the better alternative options on the market. Depending on the vendor, you can usually pick up four Kool-Aid mix packs for $1 and the Kool-Aid flavour range cover a huge color range ensuring that you can usually fine the color that you need.
Adding a Kool-Aid pack to your epoxy resin tends to perform well with the better resins on the market, even the better entry-level epoxy resin options tend to set solid without issue. That said though, there are a number of lower quality resins on the market, some of them with an inflated price tag that can have issues setting correctly if you add Kool-Aid to them.
Although your resin will “set” it tends to be soft and potentially have a sticky feel to it but it will still be translucent or transparent depending on the color of the kool-aid that you use. The majority of the better resin options on the market tend not to have this issue though and will set correctly with the resin being hard and not have a strange sticky feel to it either.
Trying Food Colorings For Transparent Resins
Although a number of people do use food colorings as a transparent resin dye alternative, they are not only hit an miss for how your resin will set on them, some of them will not be transparent or translucent when dried either. Due to this, we only usually recommend that our readers play around with various food colorings for experimentation to see what they are able to get rather than for actual serious artwork.
That said though, if you do have the time available to play around with a few different options to find a food coloring option that sets well with your resin as well as is translucent once set, you can be onto a winner as food coloring tends to be much cheaper than actual resin dye. Depending on how much artwork you are planning to do with your resin, this can end up saving you a surprising amount of money while offering decent results.
As we mentioned though, this does tend to take a large amount of time and effort to filter through the various options available. On top of this, there are posts on social media going over food colorings that other people have used with great effect but this does depend on the actual resin you use as different resins can have different end results once the resin has set too.
This means that a food coloring that works well for one person may not work as well for your if they use a different resin formula to you. This is why you often see people commenting on these posts on social media saying how they tried the exact same food coloring but it didn’t turnout as well as as the person who shared the post.
Conclusion
That brings our article going over how to color resin so it is transparent or translucent once set to an end. We have covered a number of different transparent resin dye options that you are able to use with some solid results. In our opinion, actual commercial transparent resin dye is always going to be the best option by far with cheap alcohol ink being the second best option in our opinion.
