How To: Make Perfect Petri Dice, Every Time

i've done it the perfect the perfect pea tree no uncured faces no tacky hard ones beautiful depth penetration everything you could want the perfect pea tree come with me to the lab and i'll show you how it's done the petri effect is one of the most difficult to accomplish when we're making dice not only with dice but in any resin art form from ink that just doesn't sink right to ink that sinks all the way to the bottom without leaving proper trails to a mushy mess and blend of resin colors tacky edges uncured faces working with alcohol inks to try to make a proper petri style it's just difficult no matter what you do so what can we do to make sure that we nail a crit every time there are a lot of really good inks on the market my go-to are the ranger brand alcohol inks and the brie reese brand alcohol inks both of those are going to give you really good heavy pigmentation especially with the ranger mixatives but be careful you don't want to overdo it when you're using the mixatives from the ranger line they're such a heavy concentrated pigment you can actually overshoot your sinking effect and in turn end up with just flat faces not getting the proper petri effect today i'm going to be showing you how to do the petri effect utilizing breeries alcohol inks and pinata's blanco blanco as our sinker now an alcohol sinker is what you use in order to capture the alcohol ink and draw it down through the dice this is extremely important to get the petri effect otherwise your alcohol ink will sit on the surface and only bleed a little bit there are some heavier concentrated items that you can use from pinata that are already colored but they can be a little hit or miss when it comes to proper sinking and i have found the best and most consistent results relying on the blanco blanco for your sinking and the breeze for your coloration now like i said before ranger alcohol inks are also really good at this but when you're using ranger you want to make sure to use a less amount of the blanco blanco typically rather than a full drop we'll use a toothpick to do a partial drop that way you're still getting a good balance of inking but with ranger they tend to be on the thicker side and a little bit self-sinking so keep all those variables in mind when you're choosing not only your alcohol inks but your sinking ink medium as well so now that we have the most basic understanding of what the alcohol inks and the sinking medium is let's go ahead and get to our table and start applying the science itself we'll go into a little bit more detail on how the sinker works during that application process as well so the most important thing when mixing with the resin part a and part b together you want to make sure you're introducing as few bubbles as possible as that will interfere with the petri process so slow consistent strokes making sure you're scraping the edge to get any left behind part a or part b and continue mixing until you no longer see any streaking or cloudiness with your resin most resins will typically go cloudy as the reaction starts and then clear up as you're stirring now the particular resin i'm using today is the liquid art elite from ks resin it's a great resin for petri because it has such a long work time which means you can really target exactly how you want your petri to be between either a long stringy petri short spore like petri or other styles if you're not sure how to time your resin work time we've got a video that'll go over the process of your work time and the best way to test it all right so our cloudiness is now starting to go away i'm not seeing any obvious streaking we have a fair bit of bubbles that is one drawback of the ks resin whenever you use the pump system is it introduces quite a bit of air so it's hard to avoid but since we're casting under pressure this will be all right really what you're just trying to avoid is a full foam of bubbles [Music] now remember whenever you're mixing it's always important to transfer to a new cup before you pour in your mold you don't want to carry over any of that uncured resin that might be clean clunging you don't want to carry over any of that uncured resin that might be clinging to the side of your cup so now that our resin is all mixed and ready to go for our petri method we want to make sure our mold is clear of any flashing or additional debris from any previous castings we've done since we're doing a clear base none of that shows and interrupts the style of our petri nothing's worse than casting a beautiful petri set to have a chunk of flashing floating inside one of the dice now for this i'm going to be adding a little bit of the bree reese liquid glitter so this is one of my favorites because it adds a little bit of sparkle you always want to make sure you give it a real good shake and it gives that sparkle effect without obscuring anything so you kind of get the best of both worlds you get a little bit more sparkle a little bit more shine and at the same time you're not having to worry about it obscuring your colors i usually mix this in before i pour directly into the mold but after doing my stirring so that way i know i've already got my part a and part b thoroughly mixed together there we are now the sparkles pretty much disappear in the bubbles because it's such a fine sparkle but once the compression in our pressure pot removes those bubbles it'll be very definitive gives it almost a speckle starry night effect [Music] all right so now we're going to go ahead and fill our mold if we were adding any other colorants to our base color we'd want to do that now before we go into our petri effect because i want to showcase the effect for this video i'm not doing any additional colorants to our base resin when you're filling you want to make sure you're filling no more than two thirds of the way up you want to make sure you've got plenty of room for not only the alcohol ink but for the additional resin later in the process i recommend starting with your d20s as they take the most resin that way you can make sure you get good flow control i completely obscured that [Music] now if you over fill like i did on some of these no worries just use your popsicle stick grab a little bit of that excess resin and put it right back in your cup you'll also probably have some on the surface of the mold i recommend using that to your advantage and just swiping it right into the mold it's more important that we make sure to get our resin levels correct rather than keeping everything neat and tidy because at the end of the day the worst thing is going to do your petri and then overflowing your mold and getting alcohol ink all over all right i think we're looking pretty good there so now we've got our mold partially filled on all of our dice no more than two-thirds now is when we're going to go into using our alcohol inks now when you're doing your petri effect you're always going to have a more dominant color and that's always going to be the first color you drop in so you want to be mindful of that so if you're using say a really contrasting color combo like a blue and a red then whatever color you drop in first is going to be more dominant because that alcohol inks could have more time to spread so for this particular one i want the lavender to be more dominant because it's a lighter color than our ocean green here so we're going to go ahead and drop that first we're going to prep both alcohol inks with a good shake and calf removal and then with our blanco blanco it comes in a rather large bottle i go ahead and use the larger dropper but you want to make sure you're tuning it right to getting just one small little eye drop if you struggle with that you can pour some out into a small container or cup and then use a toothpick to do your dropping okay so i'm gonna drop both these colors together in combination leading with my lavender followed by the ocean green so we're gonna do one drop and second drop and we're just going around our dice mold going one die at a time all right and then you're going to want to use your fico blanco i usually do a test drop off to the side to make sure i've got my cap calibrated correctly [Music] and you want to do one drop on each color making sure you're getting total coverage now while that's sinking it has started this sinking effect you're gonna go back over it with the same colors right in the same spot this will help avoid getting a pure white effect with your sinking because the blanco blanco will overpower most alcohol inks okay now we're just going to let this sit for a few moments let the alcohol ink do its job as you can see you've got a really nice swirl effect going you will see see some white from the blanco blanco still that is something you can either do one of two things for you can mix some blinkoblinko with the alcohol ink of your choice to get a self-sinking ink the reason i don't typically do that is it consumes a lot of the blanco blanco alcohol ink and you don't get as consistent a sinking effect i like the little bit of white that bleeds through when doing the alcohol ink sinking effects so i take it as an advantage and roll with it but if that's something you don't like you can definitely as i said before mix the blanco blanco with your alcohol inks to get a pure color for the sinking effect now this is one of the most important parts you can see we've got a little bit of leftover alcohol ink here we're going to take one of our popsicle sticks and we are going to make sure we're getting that away from our mold i typically just wipe it on the back of my glove the reason we do this is the excess alcohol that's on top isn't doing us any good all it's doing is going to limit our curing reaction because it's going to outcompete the resin now this is the most important step when doing your petri alcohol ink to get good clean faces you want to take your popsicle stick with your excess resin and you want to trace the outside of every dice you're going to follow it with just a small string on the outside edge that way the resin can slowly flow in going down the side and that makes sure that you're not plumbing the alcohol ink and pushing it out with the resin otherwise you'd get a very minor petri effect whereas this keeps the resin in the dye as it starts to spill in you want to start filling in the middle in a zigzag pattern with the light strings essentially capping and encasing the resin out with the alcohol ink trapped between the layers of resin now the most important thing to keep in mind is you're going to have some alcohol ink that's going to seep up and out there's no way to really prevent that it's just one of the occurrences that happens when working with petri you could let this cure and do a second pour but i find that even in that instance your middle layer is a little bit tacky still around the faces you still end up with a not so consistent boundary so we're just going to keep going through this tracing every single die one at a time now you can see i'm being very liberal with our application of the resin you don't want to under fill your dice you want to make sure you're getting a full good cap on them just make sure that when you're applying the resin you're not just dumping it right in the middle because that's going to push all the alcohol ink out that's not what we want now that we have all of our dies filled after tracing with the resin we're gonna go ahead and solve the issue that people run into where they have just a solid color on their dice where they apply the alcohol ink on the one face we're gonna take our popsicle stick and just drag it across all the excess resin and alcohol ink that way we're creating nice swirls and coloration this also ensures we don't have any big pockets of alcohol ink that may cause cure inhibition after we've done that let's go ahead and grab a little bit of this excess resin and put it on our cap this ensures that you don't have any trapped air whenever you place the cap the most important is getting right around the one faces on the numbers and making sure you get resin on the inside of your percentile where it's most likely to be trapped go ahead and place your cap on your mold and remember when we're putting pressure on this to squeeze out the excess you want even throughout pressure you want to use your fingertips and shimmy the mold face down you don't want to over smush on one die creating a pocket or void that's why you want to do nice even pressure across the whole way as you get that nice satisfying squeeze out once you've got your cap on double check to make sure it's good and flush and let's get this in the pressure pot now that you have your mold situated make sure you get it on your insert and into your pressure pot we're going to run this at full pressure for at least the full cure time of your resin okay so i've got our mold out of the pressure pot it's been about 24 hours now i always recommend letting your petri style mold stay in the pressure pod a bit longer just to be on the safe side now of course this technique does remove the tacky face and uncured face issue but it doesn't completely remove the effects of the alcohol ink slowing the rate of the curing because the alcohol ink itself doesn't cure so the epoxy resin really needs a little bit more time to set up and cure around it making sure it gets completely encapsulated oh that looks absolutely beautiful absolutely gorgeous so you can see here this is our top face we're gonna go ahead and crack that flashing and just giving it a squeeze and peeling away the excess and then it leaves just that little bit that's on the side or clinging to some of the dies so even before demolding you can really see how that alcohol ink you still have that really pretty coloration rather than having just a solid lump of color you get the nice mixing and blending effect because of the top casing all right that's oh yeah absolutely gorgeous full pea tree so you can see with this petri set we've got really long deep petri strains really nice plumes throughout and just absolutely beautiful base faces with no tacky issue [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] taking the techniques that we went over today i can pretty much guarantee you'll always have beautiful petri dice so remember the three most important rules first rule don't overfill your mold leave room for the ink and the resin to cap the ink two don't over apply your ink and make sure you're using compatible inks for petri like breweries or ranger alcohol inks or your own custom made inks from pure resin pigments and three give it time to cure so if you have a typical 12 hour d mold time give it 18. it's a 24 hour demol time give it a day and a half i typically just add anywhere from six to eight hours on top of the normal d-mold time just to give it that little bit of extra time to solidify fully before de-molding it's not necessary for all resins but it gives you a really nice safety net to make sure you don't have any issues with the alcohol ink exploding through the resin thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video with us here at druid dice we appreciate all the feedback and are really excited to keep bringing beautiful and amazing dice into the world through our how-to videos if you have any questions or comments make sure to leave them down below if you have a certain style or technique that you've been struggling with or want to learn more about definitely let us know so we can get that into our how to series i hope you have a beautiful day and happy dice making [Music]

Channel: Druid Dice

Views: 16,678

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Id: TT9YeO8YO8o

Length: 23min 45sec (1425 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 18 2022