My First Moldmaking/Casting Experience

So I decided to make latex rubber molds of some of my big-headed sculpture wallhangings (as discussed in a previous post). My experience was arduous, time-consuming and only produced so-so results. I had three sculptures to work with. Unfortunately, I'm an idiot and I did all three at the same time, instead of doing one whole process for an individual sculpture, so I could learn from my mistakes. Note to self: "Don't be impatient."

I also didn't take photographs of the process, which I'm a little sorry about, but what are you gonna do? Note to self: "Start taking pics of process."

But, alas, I have photos of my finished products, both the molds as well as the first castings.




















These are a couple of the latex rubber portions of the molds
after they were pulled off of the original piece. There's some strange fungus or mold growing in the rubber, which really sucks. I think it's because I left the rubber mold in the mother mold before the plaster used for the mother was completely dry. Lesson learned.

Here are a couple of the mother molds.
















And here are the rubber molds sitting in the mother molds.




















Here are the castings sitting next to their originals. Some of the pieces broke off when I first peeled off the rubber. I've already glued them back onto the original pieces in these pics. There were some impossible undercuts where rubber got totally underneath and connected back to the top. Another lesson learned. Make sure you fill in undercuts as much as possible without losing detail. Because I didn't do this, my castings didn't turn out so well in those areas. The most noticeable was in the piece with the curlies on the face. There were some areas where the plaster didn't get all the way into the rubber mold because of the curly details or improper pouring.





















All in all, they didn't turn out too badly. I've since returned to the rubber molds where the undercuts connected and cut them with scissors, so, hopefully, it won't happen on the next casting. I'm going to try painting them before I try more castings, just to see how much they absorb the paint, et cetera, to make sure I know the proper technique for next time. All in all, the exercise was informative and definitely a learning experience. The amount of detail you get with the latex rubber is really quite amazing. I'll report more as I keep learning.

Until then...I'm gonna go have a shmoke and a pancake.

Custom Wedding Party Jewelry

Here's some custom jewelry I did for someone for their wedding party.

A lesson from an old sketch

I was looking through an old sketch book the other night and I saw this sketch I had done that looked kinda cool. Here's the scrap:


But it was interesting to think about what I was trying to get across at the time I drew it. I was trying not to be so normal, maybe a little more surreal. Just get really bizarre where anything is possible. So the product was this weird mutated alien creature with an oversized extra-jointed arm, no face and a head on a long neck coming out of his shoulder. It looked kind of like a comic book style villian's henchman.


So, the lesson I gleaned from going back and looking at an old sketch: Don't put things where you expect them to be and don't limit yourself into thinking they have to be proportionate or symmetrical. Just, generally, be more creative.


So it inspired me to incorporate that way of thinking into a pendant I made out of Sculpey. Here's what I came up with:



I think the end result looks rather lovely and unexpected, but I still need to let my creativity go a little more.