I have all winter to build a hatch for my Mill Creek 15 (aft hatch only) so I decided to get a little fancy and put a design on it. After deciding that marquetry was too much of a challenge, I settled on wood burning.

I burned a nice big image of a rainbow trout about to take a fly, on my okoume hatch. It looked ok, but a little plain, so I added color with oil pastels as suggested on a woodburning website. A little rubbing and blending and it did look much better.

Now the problem. I put a coat of epoxy on a test piece of wood with the oil pastels. It just beaded up and would not evenly coat the colored surface. I guess in hindsight this is not surprising considering the pastels are oil based. A second coat covered a little better, but I am unsure of how reliable this is going to be in the long run.

I have not coated the actual hatch yet, but the image of the trout does have the oil pastel color on it (and I doubt I could get it off).

Any ideas? Would a clear spray acrylic over the pastels work? Would the epoxy stick to it?

Help!

Don