HOME | DD

Description
So I thought I'd make a bit of a tutorial on how I go about casting in resin. I'm still a bit of a beginner at this, I'm always making mistakes, as you'll see, and probably go about some things completely the wrong way, but hopefully it will be of some use, or even just a little bit interesting to someone

1. This sculpture is made from Monster clay which is quite soft, to help prevent hurting any of the detail in the moulding process I have coated the sculpt in a layer of varnish which will harden the surface. I'm just using some basic spray gloss craft varnish.
If you're doing this you must clean out your moulds before casting as it will leave a slight residue on the silicone, just giving it a good wipe with some rubbing alcohol should remove it.
As you can see I've chopped off his eye stalks as they won't cast very well if I left them on,
I'll mould them separately.

2. You can make a mould box in a number of ways from a ton of different materials, here I'm doing something a bit unusual. Because this clay is quite soft and I can get away with a straight dividing line I decided to give something different a try, I like experimenting with stuff like this.
You would usually pack clay around your sculpt to form the dividing line (I'll be doing this later with the small parts) but here I'm going to mix up some alginate and just pour it into the bottom, I'm hoping to get a really clean and tight fitting edge around the sculpt.

Alginate is usually used for moulding body parts for plaster casting, it's used by dentists, for moulding faces, baby feet... and really disturbingly my alginate came with instructions for, among other things, casting the male private part lol! God there must be a lot of people out there that do that to actually print directions for it.
I've made the mould box using a circular sheet of acrylic for the base with a couple of plastic 2 litre pop bottles cut up and taped together for the walls. I've pushed a little plasticine around the bottom to fully seal any gaps.

3. You can see Reginald here perched on a lump of plasticine, around him are some rolled up pieces of plasticine with some nuts pushed onto the ends, these will form the keys for the mould. I've made some measurements and lined everything up so they're at the correct level

4. Here the alginate has been poured, there are quite a few tiny bubbles on the surface but there's none around the edges of the sculpt so that shouldn't be a problem.

5. Cat inspection no.1 Everything seems ok with the base so I've passed this time.

6. I've glued the base for my model to a sheet of acrylic with some contact glue. I coated the acrylic with a fine layer of petroleum jelly before hand to make it easy to remove. Next I built up a wall of clay (just using some air drying clay here) this is only a very simple one part mould as the bottom is featureless, nice and easy.

Part 2:[link]
part 3:[link]
part 4:[link]
part 5:[link]
Part 6:[link]

Description
So I thought I'd make a bit of a tutorial on how I go about casting in resin. I'm still a bit of a beginner at this, I'm always making mistakes, as you'll see, and probably go about some things completely the wrong way, but hopefully it will be of some use, or even just a little bit interesting to someone

1. This sculpture is made from Monster clay which is quite soft, to help prevent hurting any of the detail in the moulding process I have coated the sculpt in a layer of varnish which will harden the surface. I'm just using some basic spray gloss craft varnish.
If you're doing this you must clean out your moulds before casting as it will leave a slight residue on the silicone, just giving it a good wipe with some rubbing alcohol should remove it.
As you can see I've chopped off his eye stalks as they won't cast very well if I left them on,
I'll mould them separately.

2. You can make a mould box in a number of ways from a ton of different materials, here I'm doing something a bit unusual. Because this clay is quite soft and I can get away with a straight dividing line I decided to give something different a try, I like experimenting with stuff like this.
You would usually pack clay around your sculpt to form the dividing line (I'll be doing this later with the small parts) but here I'm going to mix up some alginate and just pour it into the bottom, I'm hoping to get a really clean and tight fitting edge around the sculpt.

Alginate is usually used for moulding body parts for plaster casting, it's used by dentists, for moulding faces, baby feet... and really disturbingly my alginate came with instructions for, among other things, casting the male private part lol! God there must be a lot of people out there that do that to actually print directions for it.
I've made the mould box using a circular sheet of acrylic for the base with a couple of plastic 2 litre pop bottles cut up and taped together for the walls. I've pushed a little plasticine around the bottom to fully seal any gaps.

3. You can see Reginald here perched on a lump of plasticine, around him are some rolled up pieces of plasticine with some nuts pushed onto the ends, these will form the keys for the mould. I've made some measurements and lined everything up so they're at the correct level

4. Here the alginate has been poured, there are quite a few tiny bubbles on the surface but there's none around the edges of the sculpt so that shouldn't be a problem.

5. Cat inspection no.1 Everything seems ok with the base so I've passed this time.

6. I've glued the base for my model to a sheet of acrylic with some contact glue. I coated the acrylic with a fine layer of petroleum jelly before hand to make it easy to remove. Next I built up a wall of clay (just using some air drying clay here) this is only a very simple one part mould as the bottom is featureless, nice and easy.

Part 2:[link]
part 3:[link]
part 4:[link]
part 5:[link]
Part 6:[link]