How to Add Custom Inlays or Art to Resin (Cut on a Laser or Cricut)

You have seen the coasters. A crisp wooden fern, a paper silhouette, a metallic vinyl mandala, floating perfectly level inside glass-clear resin like it grew there. Then you try it yourself and the artwork drifts to one corner, curls up at the edges, and grows a beard of bubbles overnight.

The frustrating part is that none of that comes from the resin being hard to use. It comes from three specific mistakes: pouring in one deep layer, skipping the seal coat on porous art, and dropping the piece in dry. Fix those three and embedded art is one of the most reliable tricks in resin work.

This guide covers the whole path: designing the art, turning it into a cuttable vector, cutting it on a laser or a Cricut, and then embedding it with layered pours so it stays put without floating or trapping bubbles.

What This Is (and What It Is Not)

Quick scope check, because "inlay" means two different things in the maker world.

Traditional inlay is solid material set into a recess in solid material, like walnut shapes glued into pockets cut in a maple board. If that is what you want, our multicolor wood inlay guide covers that entire workflow, including how to generate the matching pieces and pockets.

This post is the other thing: flat cut artwork suspended inside clear resin. The resin is the body of the piece, and your cut art floats in it like a fossil in amber. It works for coasters, trays, jewelry, keychains, bookmarks, river-table windows, and pretty much any mold you own.

The art itself can be almost anything you can cut thin and flat:

The thicknesses are ballpark figures; products vary, so check the packaging or your machine's material profile for the sheet you actually bought. Thinner is generally better. A 0.5 mm veneer silhouette reads as art floating in glass. A 3 mm acrylic piece reads as an object encased in resin, which can also look great, but it needs a deeper mold and more layers to bury it.

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Step 1: Get Your Art into Vector Format

Your machine cuts along paths, and vector outlines give you the cleanest, most reusable ones. Cricut Design Space can auto-convert some raster uploads into cut shapes, but a proper vector cuts more predictably and works across most laser and cutting-machine workflows. If you already design in vector software, skip ahead. If your art is a sketch, a photo of a drawing, or a PNG you made or bought, convert it first.

1. Start with a bold, high-contrast image. Silhouettes, line art, and simple logos embed beautifully. Fine hairline detail gets fragile when cut from veneer or paper, and nearly invisible once resin surrounds it. If it would break as a paper snowflake, simplify it.
2. Upload it to MonoTrace. MonoTrace converts images to clean SVG outlines, free, no credits. Sign in, upload, adjust the threshold until the preview shows exactly the shapes you want cut, and download the SVG.
3. Check for trapped islands. Anything that would fall out when cut (the middle of an "O", the gaps inside a leaf) either becomes a separate loose piece to place by hand or should be bridged in the design. Loose interior pieces are fiddly to align under resin, so bridge them when you can.
4. Convert the format if your machine is picky. Cricut Design Space takes SVG directly. Some laser software wants DXF instead. File Converter does SVG to DXF free, along with the image conversions, so the format is never the thing that stops you.
5. Size it against your mold, not your screen. Measure the mold cavity and leave a visible border of clear resin on every side. Around 5 mm is a good rule of thumb for coaster-sized pieces. Art that touches the mold wall can wick resin under itself and ends up looking pinched.

Step 2: Cut the Artwork

On a laser: veneer and cardstock cut fast at low power. Run your machine's recommended settings for thin material, and cut a small test shape before committing your good veneer. Two light passes often beat one hot pass on veneer, because charred edges bleed brown haze into resin. If the cut edges are sooty, wipe them gently with a barely damp cloth and let the piece dry completely.

On a Cricut or Silhouette: cardstock, vinyl, and craft foil are all common cuts; confirm your exact sheet appears in the machine's material list before you commit it. For vinyl art, weed it as usual, then use transfer tape to keep multi-part designs aligned. You can place vinyl as a unit that way, which is a real advantage over loose laser-cut pieces for complex designs.

Whatever you cut, make two. The first copy is your rehearsal piece for the seal coat and placement. Cutting a spare costs cents. Redoing a pour does not.

Step 3: Seal Anything Porous (Do Not Skip This)

This is the step that separates the clean embeds from the ruined ones. Wood and paper are full of air. Drop them in resin unsealed and that air crawls out for hours as micro-bubbles, while the resin soaks in and turns paper translucent and blotchy. Wood can also leach tannins that yellow the surrounding resin.

1. Coat the entire piece. Both faces and, critically, every cut edge. Edges are end grain on veneer and raw fiber on paper, and they drink resin fastest. A thin layer of the same epoxy you are pouring works well, applied with a small brush. Clear-drying sealants made for paper crafts also work on cardstock; follow the manufacturer's instructions for coats and dry time.
2. Let the seal coat cure fully before embedding, per the manufacturer's cure schedule. A tacky seal coat will smear and fog when the pour hits it.
3. Check the back. Hold the sealed piece up to light and look for dull spots, which are unsealed areas that will bubble later.

Vinyl and acrylic are already non-porous, so they usually go in as-is. The one caution with adhesive vinyl is the adhesive itself: some react with resin and haze slightly at the edge. That is exactly what the rehearsal piece from Step 2 is for.

Step 4: Embed with Layered Pours

Single deep pours are where floaters come from. Most lightweight inclusions float in liquid casting resin, so wood and paper start rising the moment you walk away, slowly enough that everything looks fine when you leave the room. Layers take that physics off the table.

1. Pour the base layer. Roughly a third to half of the mold depth, mixed exactly per the manufacturer's ratio and instructions. If your resin's instructions allow it, pass a torch or heat gun over the surface bubbles, keeping it moving and at the distance the maker specifies, then cover the pour against dust.
2. Wait for the tacky gel stage. The resin should be firm enough that your art will not sink, but tacky enough to grip it. Timing depends entirely on your resin and room temperature, so go by the manufacturer's stated gel or recoat window rather than the clock. A gloved knuckle touched to the edge of the pour tells you: strings and stickiness with no wet transfer is what you want.
3. Place the art with resin under it. Brush or drop a small amount of fresh mixed resin where the piece will sit, then lay the art down from one edge, rolling it flat like applying a screen protector. That wet layer underneath fills the microscopic gap that would otherwise hold a sheet of trapped air under your art, which is the number one source of bubbles around inclusions.
4. Press gently and check position now. Once it grips the tacky layer, it stays put. Use tweezers or a toothpick, look from directly above to check centering, and fix any lean before moving on. Face direction matters too: remember that a coaster mold usually casts the display face down.
5. Pour the top layer. Pour slowly, close to the surface, starting beside the art rather than on top of it so you do not shift it. Torch the bubbles, cover it, and leave it alone through the full cure the manufacturer specifies.

For thick art like 3 mm acrylic, split the burying pour into two layers as well, respecting your resin's maximum pour depth. Pours that exceed that depth can run hot enough that some thin acrylic inclusions distort, so stay inside the manufacturer's limit and check the acrylic supplier's temperature guidance if you are pouring deep.

Common Problems and What Causes Them

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I embed regular printed paper, like an inkjet photo?

Yes, but sealing is even more critical because some inks can run or shift on contact with resin. Ink chemistry and paper coatings vary a lot between products, so seal both sides and all edges completely and test with a spare print first, whichever printer made it.

Does the vinyl stick to the mold or float in the middle?

Both are valid techniques. Sticking adhesive vinyl to the mold floor puts the design flush with the finished surface. Suspending it between layers, as described above, puts it visibly inside the resin. The layered method is the one that reads as "art floating in glass."

How thick should the resin be above the art?

Enough that the art never breaks the surface, with margin for sanding or doming later. A few millimeters of clear resin over the top reads well on coasters. On jewelry, even 1 to 2 mm works because the pieces are viewed close up.

My design has lots of separate small pieces. How do I keep them aligned?

Cut them from vinyl and place them as one unit with transfer tape, or bridge the design in vector editing so the pieces stay physically connected. Placing ten loose slivers of veneer on tacky resin with tweezers is a test of character you can simply design your way out of.

Start with the Art

The pouring technique here is learnable in one or two attempts. The thing that makes a piece worth keeping is the artwork itself, and that part is free: trace your drawing, your logo, or your kid's doodle into a clean SVG with MonoTrace, and if your laser wants DXF instead of SVG, File Converter handles the swap in seconds. Both tools cost zero credits.

If you are still deciding what to embed in the first place, our beginner resin project ideas has a full list of shapes and pieces that work well before you graduate to custom art. Cut two copies, seal like you mean it, and let the base layer gel. That is the whole secret.