I didn't spend a lot of time painting detail into these because they were experiments and I knew there was a good possibility that many or most of them wouldn't be usable in the end, so didn't want to get attached to paint jobs that would get ruined.
All the eyes are made of sculpey, varying dome curves and varying iris depths. The first few eyes I baked, but after I burned them a bit, I boiled the rest of them to avoid that happening again and I wouldn't have to paint the whites. An epoxy resin is used for a hard clear shiny coating. It takes 48-72 hours for it to cure and harden, so I had to wait a while to take pictures... I still have to wait a while for them to finish hardening, but after 42 hours, they were unsticky enough to move to take pictures of. All of them still need another dot of resin on the top to create more of a dome. I'm not sure if I should have done that earlier or not... In hindsight, what I should probably do is fill in the irises, wait for them to cure, then do the overall glaze. I'm such a ditz
As always, sorry about the shoddy photography. I just can't get things clear enough to really show close up details.
Here's the whole first batch:
This pair I knew wouldn't work out, but I was curious about how it might turn out. I used the 5 minute epoxy resin that I had left over from when I used to make jewelry. To mix it properly you have to kind of whip it, which generates bubbles. Since it cures in 5 minutes, that's too short a period for the bubbles to rise to the surface, so I don't think there's any way to get the bubbles out of a fast curing resin like that. Plus it's a bit cloudy and the finish is a bit dull.
These 3 were flatter pairs with shallower irises. the paint jobs on them are a testament as to why you should work in a well lit area lol. My lamp died on me and it was approaching twilight. I thought I had enough light, but in the light of the next day I found that I clearly didn't. Plus for some reason the resin I mixed up for these 3 is still sticky which is odd... I guess I must have not put enough hardener in the mixture somehow.
These are all different sizes. The top 4 I tried carving out grooves for the irises for added texture with light movement. That had it's positives and negatives... had to make sure the paint wasn't too thinned out or it would spread through the grooves further than you meant it to. But it can create some nice effects. I carved these ones out after I cooked the clay, so I couldn't really get a lot of fine lines in it or the clay would crumble where the lines came close together. Going to try carving iris lines before the clay is cooked in the next batch.
These 2 pairs I painted the irises a flat color and filled the concave iris with some resin mixed with fine glitter. Unfortunately I stupidly got impatient and didn't wait long enough for that to set before glazing the rest of the eye, so when I covered the whites, the glitter from the irises ran over. The pink eyes have an opalescent glitter and I thought that would be pretty over the pink background, but it didn't create as much of an opal-ish effects as I had hoped. The floating glitter is kind of pretty, but I think just putting the glitter flat on the iris surface and painting a pupil over that does make a better eye after all. Will be in my next batch.
And lastly, just a picture of some of the bubbles that got left in the resin because I waited too long to try to degas it. Once you pour the resin, 5 minutes later the bubbles rise to the top and most pop by themselves, but if you exhale onto them or run a torch about 6 inches from the surface, the carbon dioxide will pop the leftovers. I got sidetracked and didn't make it back to them in time to pop all the bubbles T_T
So I made a ton of mistakes, but learned a lot. Hopefully I'll have another batch to show in 2 more days that will look prettier ^_^
I'll take pics of the eyes on dolls when my obitsu gets here. Or if I actually manage to finish a head sculpt before that... 
