How to Make Galaxy and Ocean Resin Effects

Ask ten people what made them try resin, and half will describe either a wave — that white lacy foam curling over turquoise — or a galaxy, all violet nebulas and silver stars in black glass. These two effects are the gateway drug of this whole craft.

Good news: neither needs talent so much as sequence. They’re recipes. Follow the steps, accept that your first few will be “interesting” rather than beautiful, and by the third or fourth attempt you’ll surprise yourself.

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The shared foundation

Both effects are layered pours with movement added while the resin is workable. You’ll want: a heat gun (not a torch — more on that in a second), white pigment, mica powders, and a mold with some visual real estate. Coasters and larger pendants show these effects best; anything under an inch (25 mm) gets too busy. Something from the flatter, wider end of my mold shelf is the right canvas.

Why heat gun, not torch: a torch pops bubbles with a quick flash of heat. A heat gun pushes air. For these effects you’re physically moving resin around the surface — the gun’s airflow is the paintbrush. A torch just scorches without moving anything.

Mix one batch of resin, split it into cups, color the cups. All the usual mixing rules apply, and colored cups hide bad mixing, so be honest with your stir time before splitting.

The ocean effect

Colors: an opaque sand-tan, a translucent turquoise or teal, a deeper blue, and opaque white. That’s the whole beach.

Pour the sand color along one end of the mold. Then the teal next to it, then deep blue at the far end, letting them meet and slightly blend at the borders. Tilt the mold a touch to help the gradient. So far it’s just stripes.

The wave is the trick. Pour a thin line of white along the sand-teal border, then hit it with the heat gun at a low angle — nearly parallel to the surface, from the “deep water” side, pushing the white toward shore. The white spreads, breaks into lacy cells, and curls exactly like foam. This happens because white pigment is denser and the moving resin tears it into a lattice — but honestly, knowing why matters less than doing it at the right moment.

Right moment = resin slightly thickened, 15–25 minutes after pouring. Fresh thin resin just blends the white away into fog; I fogged my first three oceans exactly this way before I learned to wait.

My sister has a cottage in Muskoka, and the coaster set I made for it — four oceans, each wave different — is the piece of mine that gets the most comments of anything I’ve ever poured. Not my technical best. Doesn’t matter. Waves do something to people.

The galaxy effect

Base: black, or navy loaded with violet mica — pour it as the full background layer. While it’s fresh, drizzle in thin swirls of purple, magenta, and blue mica-tinted resin and drag them with a toothpick. Big lazy S-curves, not tight scribbles. Nebulas are lazy.

Then dust the tiniest pinch of silver or white ultrafine glitter across parts of the surface — a starfield. The pinch should feel too small. It isn’t.

Stars, the bright ones, come after curing: white acrylic paint on a toothpick tip, dotted sparsely on the cured surface — a few big, some medium, lots tiny, clustered unevenly the way real stars are. Then a thin clear top coat over everything seals the paint inside glass. That two-stage build (paint between resin layers) is what separates a “real” galaxy piece from a swirl of purple.

Fair warning from my own bench: the galaxy is where restraint gets tested. My first galaxy pendant had six colors, three glitters, and gold flakes, and it looked like a carnival, not a nebula. Two or three colors, black doing most of the work, one glitter. Space is mostly empty — that’s the look.

When it goes wrong

Colors blended into mud: poured too early or heat-gunned too long. Wave fog instead of lace: resin too fresh. Everything slid off-balance overnight: mold wasn’t level — check with a bubble level, it matters more for multi-color pours than anything else. And bubbles love hiding in dark bases where you can’t see them; give the base layer a proper torch pass before the artistic steps start.

Cell-by-cell control comes with repetition, and every wave is a one-off — that’s the charm. Two identical oceans would mean a machine made them.

Which one are you trying first — water or space? I find ocean people and galaxy people are weirdly consistent types. I’m ocean, for the record, which anyone who’s seen my Instagram already knows.

— Nikolai