Models, Multimedia and Monumental Mistakes!

Following on with my catching up, November was quite an exciting month all-round!

Firstly, I received quite a selection of newbies into my collection (as a result of about six months’ purchasing, it just happened they all arrived in November) including this devilish little chap…

…This exciting pair of oh-so-hard-to-get-your-hands-on Sarah Minkiewicz-Breunig CUBEquines, which I am very grateful to have…

…another wonderful trio set from Sarah’s Etsy sale (I feel so lucky to have gotten my hands on these)…

…and this pair of Stacey Tumlinson treats from her sale too!  I never knew DiCaprio was so big!

Ok, so I also bought some studio items which had me happily designing and arranging.  These stickers are made by www.moo.com (I don’t free plug people often, but they earn that from me – a wonderful company to deal with!).  I’ve always loved their stickers as they are a wonderful quality, their online ordering system is simple to use and on one occasion where I needed their customer services, they delivered!

I love their stickerbooks –I use them to help me with parcel-packing.  I use one sticker for all Airmail Small Packet parcels (otherwise it has to be written out on each parcel which takes time and handwriting – something I’ve almost lost the ability to do what with the computer age!) and I add one sticker to the from of each box with the flag for the UK, US, Europe and, with my latest order, Australia.  You wouldn’t believe how much it helps to see at a glance where your parcels are going!

The larger stickers are for use on each portrait I do so that should the customer ever want to know “who did that” or (even better) order another, my details are there for them.  I’m very pleased with these ones, they add an element of professionalism to each portrait.  I chose just three designs (just as I ran out of time and had to get them ordered) but will add more in the future.  I will tell you more about the image on the middle sticker in a moment…

As you’ve probably guessed, I did a dog portrait during November.  The portraits are becoming a little more in demand recently, so I felt I should get my pastels in order!  Seeing a good offer on at GreatArt (UK art materials stockist) I plumped for these wooden drawers:

I enjoyed a good few hours sorting and arranging my soft and hard pastels and here’s how they look now:

Top drawer – monochromes and tints

Second drawer – creams to brown

Third drawer – brights (not used so much for pets!)

Fourth drawer – greens and super-softs

The other two drawers hold the accessories (putty rubbers, tourtillions etc) and my iridescent pastels.

I had great fun – I can usually measure my fun-levels as they correlate perfectly with the level of mess I’m in once I’m done!  I think I can safely say I had fun with these

I wasn’t finished yet, either!  eBay was my November distraction and I managed to add these to my drawers too!

So, armed and ready to go I got cracking on a commission that came about through Facebook; a beautiful black Labrador named Heidi:

I’m not sure if you click that image it will show full size, so here are a few close-ups of her too:

I really enjoyed working on Heidi’s portrait, it is the first time I’ve worked on a dark, short haired dog and I’d been hoping a commission like this would come along.  Heidi’s portrait was presented to her owner at Christmas as a gift from her daughter and family.

I also managed to squeeze in a bit of sculpting in November.  Brace yourselves… I did a little work on Jasper (dum, dum DUMMMMM!)!  Sadly he’s so hard to work on in the very hard resin I cast him in (what was I thinking??) so progress is painfully slow. I’m not overly happy with the work I managed to do on him, I was trying to “flesh out” his neck with wrinkles and creases, but now I think he just looks stripey!  I don’t think these details can be carved, I will likely remove that portion of neck and sculpt it using apoxie in one big session, or may even sculpt that area using normal wax based clay so I have more control over it.  I don’t regret getting Jasper into resin form but I have to admit, with the progress I’ve been making on the Crabbet Mare I would quite like to take him back to clay so I can work on him properly again!

SO that brings me to the Crabbet Mare!  She doesn’t look like this now as I’ve been working more on her, but this is how she looked back in November:

That was all the sculpting I got to do, but, even though I wasn’t casting any of my models, I was working – I had visitors!!

Clare Stokes has sculpted two mini resins; Baladito (a Spanish horse doing “The Walk”) and Hamlet, a trotting British Cob.  She entrusted them to me to make waste molds and supply her with resin models so she could go ahead and make her prototypes.  I have made many waste moulds, all-but-one successfully.

This did NOT go to plan.

I have to warn you, some of the following images may disturb you!

The rubber I use to make my molds it a platinum-cure silicon.  I use this as, provided you follow some simple rules and use the platinum additive, they will set properly ever time.  In my studio this is no issue, I know what is good to use and I know what to avoid.  With the exception of the original Babysitter mold, when the rubber mix reacted to the chemicals I used to smooth the clay, every other mold I’ve made has set just fine.

I made the rooky-error of not doing my homework – I didn’t tell Clare these details nor did I ask her about how she worked.  She did absolutely nothing wrong and to this day we still don’t know what happened, but…

Everything was fine, the rubber looked good and solid. The cubes you can see are recycled old molds that I use to “fill” waste molds and the yellow is the Newclay base I used to keep the model upright during the pour:

I peeled away the Newclay – no problems here!

Started cutting and…OH-OH!!

The rubber around the clay original had reacted!  a 1-2mm thickness of uncured, sticky liquid rubber surrounded the model.  This was the point of no return for the clay original, you don’t get to make a waste-mold twice!  There was nothing I could do but take out the original, clean away as much uncured rubber as possible and try to cast something from the mold.  Disaster!  The worst part was that the second model was already in the rubber, probably reacting at this very moment I gave the second mold an extra day to cure, sadly it didn’t help.

I cast out a copy of each model from the awful molds, feeling as wretched as is possible.  The results?….

Told you they were shocking!  I was heartbroken – for Clare and for myself – her pride and joys that she had so willingly entrusted to my care.  I couldn’t even tell her for a day, I was so gutted and embarrassed.

All was not lost though!  If you think about it – all of the problem areas were caused by a layer of liquid rubber on the surface of the model so when cast this extra area was now made of resin, so if I sanded away the extra resin, the models were still there – just waiting for me to let them out again!  So I got sanding, very carefully and resisting all temptation to “sculpt” I very slowly began to reveal the two happy little guys from their warty overcoats!

Although these guys are the same colour as Jasper, they are made from regular “white” resin, pigmented grey.  They cleaned up beautifully and to say I was relieved to see their lovely little forms appearing, is a massive understatement!

These two have undergone another transformation since being back in the safety of Clare’s hands.  She has just sent Baladito in his gorgeous completed form to be cast!

Clare Stokes is one to watch in the hobby, the progress she is making with each sculpt she does is tangible, I can see big things for her!

Meanwhile I think I’ll be changing the rubber I use for mold-making!  Thank you Clare for letting me be a part of these lovely models’ creation and THANK YOU for forgiving me so generously for my monumental mistake on them.  This is one lesson learnt that I don’t plan to repeat!

I will post more photos (or links) of Baladito and Hamlet once they are complete.