25th ENTRY - Clay ?#!

One resounding message that has continued to ring in my ears at particular intervals during this project has been to stop being lazy and insecure, and just take a few minutes to make tests before jumping into things head first.

Today I am terribly confused. The one thing I was sure of with regards to working with silicone, from reading guidance sheets of the products themselves, and from speaking to people, was, at all costs, to avoid using water based clay for mould making. This would inhibit the silicone from curing.

The disaster in Lauder in which the other oil based clay, from Flockart, contaminated my entire work environment with, I assumed, sulphur, was proof of this danger. It did not occur to me to question whether the water clay I had also contained sulphur or any sort of inhibitor.

I never attempted building a mould with natural water based clay (apart from the first half of the grandmother mould in Italy, which however was nowhere near any contact with silicone).

Hence every mould I have made following Madame Fontaine has been prepared using Chavant oil based clay, which does not dissolve the way water based clay will with water, and hence is very difficult to make good seam lines up against the sculpture for the two halves of the mould.

Although the clay I used was either grey or terracotta colour, and the figures pale wax, it was still impossible to clean the clay away from the figure without pulling away chunks of the sculpture. The two materials had similar consistencies, and could be softened or diluted only with the same solvents, such as lighter fluid or white spirit.

Last night I had dinner with Andrea Leanza, and whilst talking about moulds, I found that he knew of no reason to be wary of using water based clay with silicone, and wondered how ever one would build up the walls without it.

I came home quite puzzled. I felt that everyone I had ever spoke to about this had strongly advised me to stay away from water clay. At the same time, many of the tutorials I had looked at used water clay.

Water based clay will clean off the sculpture and the mould easily without harming the sculpture.
Out of some strange misinformed notion I proceeded the very hard way.

Today I cleaned out the recently finalised mould of Russeau's hands, and cast them for the costume mannequin, leaving some extra silicone to use as a test on the Deruta water clay my parents brought up with them when they drove here from Assisi, which I nearly threw away a number of times, but somehow kept just in case.

To my bewilderment it seems the silicone cured perfectly well on the water clay.

Every day I feel like starting over again completely.

Every mould I have made has been imperfect for a few reasons, but the fact that I thought I could not use water clay is probably the biggest factor in preventing me from making good moulds.
Why I never took 20 minutes to test the two elements together I do not know.