Hi everyone! Yes I know I didn’t post last week. I’ve been crazy busy with some research & development, working on that sea n’ sky sword, and also doing a writing gig that I got with a local games company. Yay!
A bunch of stuff that’s within my skillset but never done it before. That leaves me with not much to show you but soon I will have stuffs I can take pics of. (Nobody wants to see my random pieces of clay and paint smears. LOL)
Today I will be testing out some new translucent silicone from SEMOST. They were kind enough to send me a sample of their product so I can see how it performs. I am going to be moulding the artificial stone that I created to make my new witchlights. Might as well do something practical with it!
I wanted to try a translucent silicone so that I can see at least some of the voids and bubbles that sometimes mess up my projects and be able to tilt or apply vibration to the right spots to get them out before the resin solidifies.
What’s more: it seems to be cheaper than the Zhermack 22A I’ve been buying from Materialshop. It may be a different story when I buy a bigger quantity of the SEMOST and have to pay customs fees on it … Either way, I’m trying my best to push down the cost of my products while keeping the quality high. This is not an easy thing to do.
I know, I know, I haven’t got any new pictures for you today. Bad Ethan! 😦 I was so busy getting the mould box reconstructed that I forgot to take a photo of it! I’ll make it up to you and take lots of photos of the process today. Forgive me?
I got my order of silicone in at the end of last week and I am ready to have a rematch with the half of the sword mould that cured too fast! Everybody cross your fingers, toes, and eyeballs for me and hopefully we’ll have a brand new mould ready to rock by tomorrow.
Are you excited? I’m terrified! Let’s go! ADVENTURE! 😀
Woo! I got some new platinum based moulding silicone from Materialshop.fi and oh my gosh it is the best stuff I have ever worked with. I wish I had started working with this from the very beginning. It would have saved me so much time and money!
I got a small test batch to see how it would work since I’ve only ever worked with tin based silicones before and I was nervous about messing it up. I decided to try casting a stone that has about the size, shape, and texture that I want for the much-requested witchlights. (I know you guys have been asking for them and I promise they’ll be available as soon as I get through all the design challenges!)
Enough jabbering. Let’s have some pictures!
Step 1: Seal object to be moulded.
Step 2: Cover object to be moulded in clay up to the halfway mark.
Step 3: Pour in silicone. Wait. Take out finished mould.
Step 4: Flip it over. Seal the completed half of the mould. Pour in more silicone. Wait. Take out your finished mould!
What’s next for this week? Well, I will be testing out this baby with some resin and fiddling with some light fixtures. (Have I mentioned how freaking hard it is to hide electronics inside a transparent object? AAAAHHHHH!) And I will also be finishing the closure on the Clariel sword I have almost ready to go. Then some very patient Shadowhunter will be getting an email they’ve been awaiting for a long time!
Thanks everybody for sticking with me and supporting me while I go through the hurdles of designing, improving, and crafting. I’m doing my best to make my art works available for everybody. It has forced me to make big changes, innovate, learn, and step so far out of my comfort zone I’m not sure where it is anymore. HA! But seeing the results makes it all worth the blood, sweat, and tears.
Wish me luck everybody! Off I go to make some more magic.
Yay! After harrowing adventures, I finally have a completed silicone mould for Clariel
Why is it two different colours? Well, I ran out of the pink silicone from Alumilite halfway through the moulding. It took a little bit more than I thought it would. Then the white silicone from FormX didn’t set the first time I used it because I accidentally mixed too little catalyst. (I thought it said 100:1 but it actually said 100:5.) Annnnd when I was cleaning the un-set silicone off the pink stuff that I did have on the other side, the turpentine shrank the pink silicone and caused parts of it to rip. So I had to re-cast the entire half mould all in the white stuff.
In addition to that, because my workshop is so cold (17 degrees C or 62.6 degrees F) I had to rig up a little hot house out of foam for the white silicone to cure. It’s much happier at 24 degrees C. I almost despaired and tossed it out because it hadn’t gotten totally solid overnight (Thursday night) and when I arrived on Friday, it was still very smushy. The thing about tin-curing silicone is: if it’s not cured by the end of its stated curing time, it’s not gonna. Unless …
Unless it’s too cold. If it’s too cold, it’s probably still curing just reaaaaaally slowly. So I crossed my fingers and warmed it up. In a few hours, it set! Woohoooo! I can’t tell you how happy and relieved I was.
So, today, I still have a bunch of cleaning to do from the failed curing (last Monday) and the retarded curing (last Thurs/Fri). Un-cured silicone is a nightmare to clean up cause it doesn’t react to very many chemicals. I use turpentine, and then concentrated dish-soap to clean up the residual oil. Or I use acetone or 100% isopropyl alcohol. It depends on how cured it ended up, what it’s stuck to, and how stubborn it’s being.
Once I have a nicely cleaned working area, I can tackle the actual casting in resin. I’m kinda terrified. I hope it’s not as challenging as the silicone!
Research is annoying, boring, and absolutely necessary. I bet you’re tired of seeing these little squares aren’t you? I sure am. Silicone and resin are both notoriously finicky substances. Each brand and each type has their own particular formula and behaviour. Luckily, I knew to expect this and bought extra to test and fiddle with before casting a big beautiful sword.
Always. Buy. Extra.
So what can you do when your materials are not behaving themselves they way they should? Search online for the answers, do some more digging, ask other artists, watch videos, read tutorials, contact the manufacturer. If it turns out that there’s more than one possibility, you’ll find yourself in the unfortunate situation I’ve been in for the past few weeks.
You have to make the best guess you can as to what went wrong and do it again changing only one thing at a time. It’s tedious and frustrating and you’ll really, really want to make it go faster, but it’s necessary to isolate the problem so you can fix it. If you change more than one thing and suddenly it works, (or messes up even MORE) then you’ll never know where the mistake happened in the first place! The ultimate goal is learning more about how the materials work so you’ll waste less and be more sure of yourself later on.
You’ve all seen my first attempt with Alumilite.
Why is it sticky!?What happened? The resin was too cold. My workshop is only about 17-18 degrees Celsius. (Yeah it’s not so comfy this time of year.) That’s too chilly for Alumilite waterclear to cure and not even a heat gun on the mould beforehand made a difference.
For the second attempt, I put the silicone mould in my mini oven that I use for clay baking and propped the door open. This kept the internal temperature of the oven at a toasty 50 degrees Celsius.
Well, it’s not sticky at least … It cured all the way through, nice and hard, but there were weird, flaky patches on the surface of the resin. What could possibly have caused…
Wait a second. Ah! The plaster “jacket” I made to keep the silicone mould flat and secure was made of gypsum. Why is that important? Gypsum doesn’t conduct heat very well at all. That can be really useful for some projects. For this one, though, it sucked. The plaster caused the temperature of the resin to be inconsistent.
Worse than that, the flaking of the resin actually scratched the silicone mould. That means anything I cast with that mould will have scratches all over it. Greaaaat. So I had to make another mould. I made it double the thickness of the original mould so it could stay flat and secure all by itself.
Ah yeaaaaah! That’s what I’m talking about! The resin stayed nice and toasty throughout its curing and hardened all the way through. No stickiness, no weird bubbles, no probl- Oh. Yeah there are some dark flecks in there. It’s not a uniform pink.
Sigh.
Yeah, the dropper I used to put the dye in the resin had a semi-dried “booger” in it. (I call bits of congealed paint, glue, whatever that gets stuck in the nozzle of something a “booger”. I don’t think that’s the technical term for it.) So the clump of dye came out in the resin and failed to dissolve into it.
But I’m still happy. “Use a clean dropper” is a really easy fix!
As I always say: “There’s no such thing as perfection; only beauty.” So how can we feel better at being forever imperfect? Just have a look at where we started and see how much we’ve grown!
Are you stoked? I’m stoked! Let’s get to the workshop and make cool stuff!
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