Adventures in 3-D

In between chaos and gardening and finishing Campbreath art and trying to put together pieces for two back-to-back conventions in June, we’ve been fooling around for the last week and some change with molding and casting.* I’ve done a couple of little sculptures in sculpey, and we’re trying to cast them in hopes of making copies.

This is not terribly easy, and we’ve had a lot of excitement of the sort where you realize AS YOU ARE POURING that this is not going to work, and then you have approximately ninety seconds to find a solution. There has been jury-rigging, by which I mean we have been building mold frames out of Legos and using a decommissioned vibrator to agitate the mold to get the air bubbles out. (Lego works REALLY well, by the way…)

Finally—right about the point we had poured the plaster of paris and I realized that I had no idea how long it took plaster to set—I called my stepfather, who’s a sculptor by trade, who told me all kinds of useful information that would have been really helpful about three hours prior. But never mind! Onward and upward! I will get at least ONE good cast out of this bloody thing if I have to glue the tusks back on and sand every damn piece by hand!

I have a dream that someday I will be able to make a neat mask, but for the moment, I will settle for a couple of paintable plaster bits of wall art.

 

*And I do mean “we.” Kevin has been doing the heavy lifting on the engineering end of this. If it was just me, I would still be trying to get the lid off one of the jars.

2 thoughts on “Adventures in 3-D

  1. Meghan says:

    Your descriptions of plaster pouring problems makes me think of a day at work back when I was in college. We were trying to make a concrete wall and the form broke halfway through pouring the concrete. Lots of scrambling to get things cleared up, swearing, trying to jury rig something that would work, etc. Not terribly fun at the time, but a fun story later. Your solution of the Legos and the vibrator did make me laugh. Yay for ingenuity!

  2. Uzuri says:

    This is why I’m glad that I really don’t have the kind of studio space I need to do sculpture any more. And I was a sculpture concentration in college. The only thing that really stuck in my mind from the mold work we did was the fact that I’m allergic to plaster of Paris. It and the bluing meant I had mottled purple arms for a week.

    Mold making. Preserve us from it.

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