Albert and Victoria

Remember these guys?

I have them finished now and after a little wait while I dealt with the backlog caused by a nasty bout of glandular fever I can finally get cracking on them!  They are very shiny in this photo as my intentions are to cast them in a variety of resins including clear resin, which needs a nice smooth finish in order to really show its clarity.  I will find out once casting begins if I need an alternative mold for white copies, where I will make them matte for easier paint-adhesion.

Here is the mold so far (along with my little helper under the glass table top).  I managed to forget to take my usual reel of in-progress shots, but here you can see that I’ve built a mold box, affixed the medallions to the base (this mold will cast one Albert and one Victoria so they can be exact colour matches when required) and poured the rubber.  The rubber has coated further up the sides of the box where it was vacuumed before going into my pressure tank.  I left it overnight in the pressure tank to cure fully and here it is from lunchtime today, I’ll take it all apart tonight when I get home and see how it came out.  I was aiming for a nice romantic pink as per the design of the medallions but as you can see managed to get a more cerise shade instead!  Ah well, all molds are pigmented different colours in my studio as it helps to keep track of them.

I’ve started using a new type of rubber, or rather, an old type: originally I used a tin-cure rubber (add small amount of catalyst to rubber, mix, pour, leave to set) which is completely opaque, but moved on to a platinum cure rubber (mix equal amounts of part A and part B and then add catalyst, mix, pour, leave to set) later on as it was recommended as being more reliable and is slightly translucent when cured which helps with cutting open molds.  The platinum cure WAS more reliable… except when it came to the uncontrollable factors that some models have, such as model sculpted by other artists which I have been moldmaking for more and more recently.  I can’t risk these errors, especially with other people’s sculptures so decided, on balance, that when things do go wrong, tin-cure rubber does less damage than platinum cure, so my decision was made to change back to the tin cure.

I also had issues with the platinum cure rubber not lasting long enough, so after taking some advice I am now using a new rubber; Bluesil (previously called Rhodorsil) RTV 3325 to be precise, which I am promised will give me a more realistic number of casts before degrading.  I have yet to test it to destruction but over the coming months will be doing just that.

The Valentines medallions aren’t the only thing I’ve been casting lately, but I can’t show you some of my other projects except in a more abstract way like this: