SQUID SQUID SQUID SQUID SQUID

OH HAI!

What a fine afternoon for doing art.

Who am I kidding? EVERY afternoon is a fine afternoon for doing art.

Now, one thing about props building is the more skills you know, the more employable you are. What does that mean?

I spend a lot of my free time teaching myself new skills and practicing old ones.

Like casting!

My fine and upstanding neighbour Lisa has been teaching me casting. We started with an easy one piece mold.

If I were smart, I'd have taken in progress pictures. As it is, you get this:

In the Beginning, Rosemart created the table and the squid.

This is sculpted out of Sculpey.

Or Fimo.

I can't remember. One of the two. I honestly can't tell the difference between them.

After this was sculpted, baked, and gently greased, Lisa butchered a plastic container to contain all the delightful, delightful liquid rubber.

(Does that phrase sound as dirty as it felt to say it?)

The rubber had to set up overnight. Afterwards I popped the squid free, greased up the hole again (heh), and cast this beauty out of liquid plastic:

Too much squid is never a bad thing.

I am brand new to casting, so I had some...things...that I'm not sure how to diagnose.

Specifically, my first casting foamed up a lot and overflowed the mold.

I suspect that is mostly my fault because I stirred too much air into it when I was mixing it. This theory is strengthened by my second and third castings, with which I was extra careful, and did not foam up so much.

Still. They foamed too. Lisa suspects moisture presence, though I tried to keep everything dry.

Only time (AND SCIENCE!!) will tell. Here is a primed one:

Looooook into my semi-gloss beeeellybutton...

The paint no stick so well, because painting plastic licks balls. I even primed them very carefully with plastic spray paint first (AND YES, I REMEMBERED TO WASH OFF THE GREASE), but the paint no stick so well. Perhaps I shall have to try different paint. Or maybe a coat of spray glue first?

Anyway. This one got a bajillion tiny coats of plastic spray paint, then a coat of red acrylic.

And here's one that's ready to be hung from some chain:

The light did funny things. I was photographing it in my basement under work lamps. Not ideal.

I like how these turned out. The detail is nice, and although I had to make a few sacrifices to make the mold work properly in the back, you can't tell on the front.

Finally, a shot of all five casts, the original, and my mold:

Yeah, yeah. Shit lighting. I know. DEAL WITH IT, PUNK.

I have some sort of vague plan to turn these into necklaces and sell them on Etsy...if my perpetual self-loathing of my own work can be overcome long enough to list them.

I'll post some links when that happens!


~Rosemart the Destroyer.