Belt Buckles
I wanted to make custom belt buckles of riverscapes, one for myself and two others for buddies. One river section was of the Buffalo Fork, which is outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I created another of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.
Here are the supplies I used: Lasercut walnut wood (1/8”), blank belt buckles, Tuck Tape, Art Resin, blue ink, a hairdryer, sandpaper, polish, and wood finish.
First, I went onto Google Maps to find the river section. In the satellite layer view, I zoomed in thinking about the thickness I wanted the river to be and how much resin would show on the physical belt buckle. I wanted a good proportion of the resin river to the wood. I took a screenshot when it was to my liking.
I brought the screenshot onto my iPad Pro, created a layer on top of the screenshot, and drew the outline of the river. Then, I brought the drawing into Illustrator where I did an image trace to turn the line into a vector image. Still, in Illustrator, I created an artboard the size of the piece of walnut wood I was using, outlines of the size of the blank belt buckles, then layered riverscapes onto it in the way it would cut on the laser cutter. I laser cut the wood at my local maker space and brought it home to put it all together.
Blue tape was laid over the cuts to keep all the small pieces together. I took the tape off, pulled out the cuts, and removed the unwanted rivers and smallest pieces. I wanted to create three buckles, but I wanted to experiment just a bit with all three. For two, I wanted the wood to be exposed or raw with a blue-tinted river. For the third, I spray-painted the buckle blue and was going to have the wood be layered with clear resin.
I got my buckles and ink ready and started to mix up my Art Resin. Art Resin is a two-part mixture, with the medium and the hardener. It is crucial to measure and fully mix these in equal parts or the resin won’t harden properly.
I used Tuck Tape, which is a super sticky tape ideal for resin pouring projects, to create “beds” where my wood could be held together and hold the resin in the rivers.
With the clear resin, I poured it over the entire piece of wood using a brush to hit all the spots. For the other two, I put a bit of ink into the resin mixture to give it a blue tint, then poured it into the rivers. I used a hairdryer to get the little bubbles out and make sure it seeped into the river fully.
I let the resin flow out onto the surface of the wood, which in other projects might be frustrating because the resin would need to be sanded off and it gets extremely hard. For this one, I decided that the current bottom would become the top and I placed the buckle on it, allowing the resin to be the glue to hold it together.
After it hardened and cured for two days I pulled off the tape. I was able to remove resin on the surface and smoothed the wood by gradually working through textures of sandpaper ending with polish (Flitz) and wood conditioner (Old English). For the piece with the resin poured over the top, it just didn’t look as good, so I reversed direction, put the wood on the outside, and attached the buckle and riverscape using Gorilla Glue.
I bought a leather belt for attaching this buckle and now have my custom riverscape belt buckle and two to give away.
