I love resin and have been using it for a couple of years now to finish my paintings. It really brings out the colours – in particular if I use iridescent paints. But getting rid of bubbles in resin was one of my bugbears when I first starting out as well as getting holes in the resin where it pulls away from the paint and additives underneath.
You can see my solution to getting rid of resin holes on painting here and I am so glad I figured that one out as it gives a really smooth, blemish free finish on the paintings.
Getting rid of resin bubbles is also pretty easy and makes the finish really clear. When I first started out I used my hairdryer which did an OK job but it didn’t get rid of all of the really small bubbles that would appear so I decided it was time to invest in something with more powerful heat.
Bubble Popping Options
There are a couple of options that you can use to get the bubbles out – basically you need a source of heat to get the air to the top of the resin and the bubbles to pop. I know a lot of people use a kitchen blow torch or something similar with a naked flame but I was keener to use something with less of a fire risk so I went for a heat gun.
As I didn’t have a lot of spare cash I went with a pretty inexpensive option – this Amtech hot air gun which is less than £20 in the UK and comes with different head attachments – I found the really useful one for paintings was the flat one shown in this picture which enables you to cover a lot of the painting in a small amount of time.
You only need to go over the painting twice with the hot air gun to get all of the bubbles out pretty much immediately. It has 2 heat settings but I have only needed to use the lower setting so far which does the job perfectly.
You can also get similar options in the US including this hot air gun which is under $20 and has similar nozzle attachments including the flat one that I find most useful.
Professional looking paintings
I’m really glad that I invested in one of these as I am now super happy about how the resin looks on the paintings and it appears much more professional with no bubbles in the resin.
I took a couple of pictures of the last painting that I did to show the difference between resin that I had just put on and after I had used the hot air gun to get rid of the bubbles. if you can’t see the bubbles in the picture on the left then click on the image to enlarge it.
