How to pour your first ocean board

An ocean board is the piece almost everyone wants to make first, and it is genuinely a good place to start — resin does most of the composition for you, and the failure modes are forgiving. But there are two moments in the process where a beginner's board and a studio board diverge, and both of them happen in under ninety seconds.

Before you mix anything, level the bench

Resin is a liquid for the next forty minutes. A two-millimetre slope across a 300mm panel will quietly pool your entire pour into one corner while you are busy admiring the lacing. Put a spirit level on the bench — not the panel, the bench — and shim it.

Seal the panel, then tape the underside

Bare wood drinks resin and outgasses air into it — that's where the fine bubble haze along the grain comes from. One thin flood coat, left to tack for four hours, solves it entirely.

Then tape the underside edges. Resin will run over the sides, and it will cure into hard drips exactly where the piece has to sit flat on your wall. Tape means you peel them off instead of sanding them off.

Three blues, not one

The single biggest difference between a board that reads as ocean and a board that reads as swimming pool is that real water isn't one colour. You need a green-leaning shallow, a neutral shelf, and a deep with a trace of violet in it — that violet is what your eye interprets as distance.

• Shallow — the shore. Green undertone, most translucent.
• Shelf — the body. Neutral, and you will use the most of this.
• Deep — the drop-off. A trace of violet, most opaque.

Lay the horizon, don't blend it

Pour Deep across the top third, Shelf below it, Shallow at the shore end. Then stop. The instinct to blend the boundaries with a stick is the first place beginners go wrong — gravity and surface tension will do it better than you can, and they'll do it with a soft irregular transition instead of a smeared one.

The swell — two passes, not five

Ribbon your white paste across the line where Shelf meets Shallow. Two passes. The second place beginners go wrong is here: more white feels like more surf, but past about three passes the white stops reading as foam and starts reading as fog.

Open the cells

Hold the torch about fifteen centimetres above the surface and move at a walking pace, parallel to the shore. You will see the white break open into lacing within a couple of seconds. Keep moving. A torch held still will scorch pigment and leave a brown bloom that cannot be fixed.

Then leave it alone

Dust cover on immediately, and do not move the piece for twelve hours. Every board we have ever ruined, we ruined by picking it up to look at it.

Your first board will not be your best board. Buy enough resin for two.— Rohini Kadam