I have been using resin for a while now on my paintings and I use the lovely Art Resin which works on a 1 to 1 basis of resin and hardener. In a bid to figure out how much resin should I use on my paintings I looked on the Art Resin online calculator. This tells you how much resin you should use for a particular size of painting – but for me this slight overcalculates the amount I need and if I make up as much as they say then I do end up with some left over.

So I have done my own workings based on the fact that I had a quantity of 60 x 60 cm paintings that I was creating for an exhibition in London and I started off with making up too much resin and then slowly changed the amount until I had exactly what I needed to cover the painting without it spilling over the sides and leaving drip marks.

For the 60 x 60cm paintings I ended up using 380ml in total – so 190ml of the resin and 190ml of the hardener.

Using One Cup

The way I measure it out is as follows:

1. Put 380ml of water into a measuring jug.
2. Pour half of this (i.e. so that there is 190ml left in the measuring jug) into your mixing cup.
3. Mark on the outside (so ideally you need at least a semi opaque mixing cup – I often use old yoghurt pots and sometimes plastic cups for the smaller paintings) with a marker pen the line for the half way measure.
4. Pour the rest of the water in to the mixing cup and mark the top level.
5. Wipe all of the water out of the mixing cup!
6. Pour in resin to the half way mark
7. Pour in hardener to the full mark
8. Stir and count to 180!

This makes it easier (and less wasteful) than having to use 2 cups to measure out each amount and also you know exactly how much you are adding in.

Different Amounts

The calculator on the Art Resin website says that you need 571ml for a 60 x 60 cm painting but for me this would be way too much (and a bit of a waste of expensive resin!).

For a 30 x 30cm painting (which is a quarter of the size of the 60 x 60cm) I use 100ml of resin and hardener just because that makes it easier to measure out. If you don’t have much resin left or you have a smaller measuring jug you could go down to 90ml and that would cover it.

So for some standard sizes of canvas I would use the following:

60 x 60cm – 380ml

50 x 50cm – 270ml

40 x 40cm – 170ml

30 x 30cm – 90ml

Make sure when you put the resin on the painting that you pour it reasonably evenly over the whole surface. Also, don’t allow too much resin to go to the centre as that is where it is likely to gather, especially on larger canvases, just due to the tightness of the canvas at the edges. Also, always make sure that your canvas or painting surface is completely level, so that the resin does not fall over the edges. You can only do this using a spirit level (US link) or this one (UK link) – which you can get pretty cheaply, it’s not good enough to just judge it by eye.

Also, if you struggle with holes in your resin then take a look at this post which shows you how to stop getting pitted holes in your resin coating.