27th ENTRY - A Re-Proportioned Isolde

I work to my best abilities, knowing that this is the best I can do, whist at the same time suffering a nagging little notion that if only I allowed myself to push a little further, I could do better.   And the thought that this might be my last chance, that later, for one reason or another, I will not have this opportunity, or my talent will fade, which seems to happen, and therefore no, it will not do, I must do better. 

With the decision and need for a new armature, Isolde's bad proportions, which had been forced by the first armature, were open for adjustment.

Since Liz was struggling so much with trying to work out a functioning pattern for a dress to fit Isolde, adding more pleats and length in places that shouldn't need them, I felt she would understand and welcome my intentions to go back and re-sculpt Isolde.

I told her I would spend two or three days fixing her proportions. I would then make a new mould, cast a new costume mannequin, and take the new mould to John Wright for the new armature.

Eleven weeks later I had accomplished this.

ADJUSTING ISOLDE'S PHYSICAL PROPORTIONS

The white modelling wax doesn't melt down very well, so it doesn't really pour into a mould. I managed to brush and dab it in.

I sliced up one half cast (front half) as a three dimensional sketch,
shortening her proportions.
I then brushed up a new full cast (front and back made separately)
and followed where I had cut and shortened the "sketch".

New tool. I noticed that sculptors tend to use a rake-like tool
to help keep the shapes clear and visible. I never studied
sculpture, so am constantly learning.
I made these two tools with sewing pins and polymorph.
Love them!

rake work

I finally purchased a Dremel, after spending hours
filing hard wax into a bottle and bowl, and reluctantly spending far too
long hand grinding down the armatures where needed, and often
just avoiding doing it. So now I was able to shorten the feet a little.

Another majour frustration. Light. Uneven light was making
it so tricky to see what I was doing.
I moved around the room a lot, as the window light
was affecting the lamp light. Finally I went and got a fluorescent
magnifying lamp, and moved from the centre of the room
to right between the two windows. And I was
blessed with a freebee desk on my morning walk.

New work station.

I know how artists are able to reach what others might describe as perfection, and then keep pushing things forward, sometimes losing that previous state of perfection and never regaining it again.  Innocent bystanders see the work as what it is, every time they look at it. But often elements will either bother, or be lacking for the artist, who will keep pushing forward, unaware of the present successful state of the work.  Often this means that the work changes dramatically and only a subtle ghost of that previous state remains.

The two images above are dated exactly one month apart.

I found that I would keep reworking things over and over again, even though the bystanders thought things looked good as they were. I would then look back at the pictures of previous states, and struggle to see what had changed.

Legs were still too long. Then too short. Then too long again.

Liz came in and looked, and, although I had reworked the hand down
in scale quite a bit, noted that they still looked enormous.
When I got my new lamp, I also picked up some thin copper wire.
I was annoyed by the thickness of the aluminium wire I had for fingers,
and this very fine stuff seemed just as strong, if not stronger,
and the fact that it had more memory bothered me little
given the fact that it was so pleasantly thin.

In my constant research, which mostly fails to find anything
useful, I finally came across pages about artists who
sculpt action figures using hard wax casts of their
initial sculptures for fine tuning the details by carving.
This seemed like the way to do it, but I need to find the right
wax, and it will be for next time.

I tested my new mould concept, described in the previous entry.
It looked promising.

Yes, I started using Lego.

Feet are something done differently this time.
She is on her toes to avoid verticals in the mould.
I also embedded nuts in the mould.

Successful silicone master.

Quick resin cast from the silicone. Interesting how
light behaves differently with a different material.

Unfortunately one ear was crushed whilst I removed the
rubber mould. I cast a new one from the rubber mould, but of course
nothing is so simple. Getting it to fit back in place is impossible,
so it required much work.

Wax walls surrounding figure to leave flashing canals.
I also brushed a thin coat of resin onto the face and some other
areas to protect them and force me to accept that they
were finished.

hands will be separate pieces of the top half of the mould.

As she had been sculpted in pieces, she came out in pieces.
A pleasant surprise that she resisted much less than previous
figures. Nearly intact. 

My best mould yet. And by far the slowest.
Because the resin heats up when it cures, I was advised to
keep layers thin, to avoid heating up too much and warping.
This made the process ever so slow.

Costume mannequin armature. Wire and polymorph.

Silicone cast - costume mannequin. Flashing canals helped.

Isolde version I, and Isolde version II.
Was it worth all that trouble?
Yes.

P.s. her nose had an air bubble,
but being a costume mannequin I left it.

26th ENTRY - Moulds in the Future

Note to Self

My design of the join in the upper arms of the puppets, allowing for the arm and hand to be replaced, was not very successful. I knew it would be impossible to achieve a perfect join in this way, but at the time it was the best solution I could think of.

 

After experiencing the mould-making process as well as silicone as a material, I have come up with a new solution for the future.

Maintain the sculpture intact. Make three moulds at once - Mould 1 for body, Mould 2 and 3 in a second step for arms with hands.

In step 1, make the bed and walls for the figure, with a clay wall cutting off the arms.

Step 2, clean away the clay wall separating the arm to reveal the resin from the body mould made in step 1.

Make a guide in the upper arm, lower down than the mould wall, which will be the cut line for replacing an arm. This guideline should be made into the sculpture as well as into the mould bed (see bottom of the page in Fig. 1).

This should give three moulds. It will probably be a positive thing to have a separate mould for each arm, as rarely will both hands need to be replaced at the same time, and it is confusing to know which part of the two halves of a mould correspond during casting when there are two separate elements in the mould and one only wants to cast one.

With this method, during casting of a replacement hand the upper arm will fit into the hand mould and the cast will adhere to it directly in this stage, instead of requiring a joining stage post casting (Fig. 2).

Note: It may be a good idea to devise a way to fix the three moulds together for the first complete casting, though perhaps not important.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Also, feet have been problematic in the mould-making process, as well as in the casting phase, because of their vertical position. 

Feet should next time be either spread out sideways, or, and probably preferably, in order to avoid twisting leg muscles, pointing straight down as a ballet position.

As Tobias has not yet finished sculpting Mr. Bernard, I may suggest that he try this approach.

TEST

Entry: Wednesday October 3rd, 2012

Before making the new mould from the re-sculpted Isolde, I decided it was important to test the above theory.

I used the silicone "dress mannequin" cast from the original Isolde for this test. The fact that this figure was a thick silicone cast made moulding her a bit tricky, as she tended to move around a bit, and her thumb popped out of the first half of the resin mould (the bed).

But, although it was a very crude test, I believe it was successful.

Before the test, however, I did succumb to a nostalgic weakness, and took the bus to Kingston to enjoy some moments in a toy shop, surrounded by Lego.

I cannot claim it as my own idea to use Lego blocks for mould-making walls, but they are wonderfully therapeutic, and do the job quite nicely. Fascinating how much fun they still are.

Figure resting face down. Water based clay built up for her resin back part of the mould (which I refer to as bed).
I brought the clay quite high up, making deep undercuts, as she will be cast in rubber, and for the arm replacement process, the bed needs to be shallow enough for her to lay in it easily.

Resin poured for mould back

In the first step, I made two little notches in the clay, following the cut seam line in the arm. These will be a guide for cutting the arm off, and for lining it up in the mould.
Here above I separated the arm with a clay wall. I used two toothpicks sticking through the clay wall which would be embedded into the resin, and act as forks to hold together the two parts of the upper mould. In the proper mould I will use steel pins, probably hex keys.

Second part poured, after removing the clay wall.
This picture was taken after everything had cured and I had removed the Lego walls.

Before pouring the two top parts of the mould, I laid down strips of clay to leave trenches. These will allow excess silicone to escape during casting, without blocking the mould from closing tightly.

A new silicone cast from this mould. The arm looks messy because the original was so, from my previous bad method of joining arm to body.
However, the cut line was visible, making it easy to cut off the arm using the guideline. The arm came off a la Terminator II.

Figure laying in bed, with bare armature arm in place for new skin.

Casting new arm

New arm cast directly to the figure. first arm above.
The experiment was successful.

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.

24th ENTRY - PROPS

I am always on the lookout for tiny objects, perhaps vintage doll house pieces which might miraculously be in the right scale for my sets. But it is extremely rare that I find something fitting the dimensions, or that is up to the standard that I seem to have imposed.

Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother (ca. 1926-1936)

It occurred to me that I am not wrong to be so picky about details like bottles and cutlery. In a painting one can leave parts undefined,  bringing focus to the areas that are defined and finished. This can be seen in drawings by Ingres, or figurative paintings by Arshile Gorky, and they are executed in such a way that we do not doubt the artist's ability to draw those areas, such as hands. It is a conscious decision, which creates a certain tension and strength to the areas the artist is focused on.  Cinema uses a similar technique, by means of depth of field, and choosing what to focus on.

But sloppily crafted objects in a scene, whether they are focused on or not will just seem sloppily crafted.

Why not create objects that carry as much importance as the elements surrounding the artist in Dick Ket's self portraits?

Dick Ket, self-portrait, 1932

Dick Ket, still-life with Flute, 1932

I hunted around for a small lathe. I knew one of the first objects I wanted to create was a wine bottle, and that sculpting one would be impossible. Objects we find in the kitchen have perfect and precise shapes, which one cannot hope to mimic freehand. 

A few lathes came up on ebay, but I wasn't prepared to pay so much for something I had never used before, and which I had no idea how well it would help me.

When Liz took a short course in jewellery-making, and made a silver ring from a lost wax casting, she carved the original in a very hard blue wax, which she could carve into and file and sand. I decided to get a block of this wax from Tiranti, and see what I could make with it.

I made a first attempt at a pasta bowl using the Fimo Air Light. I made a block of it, let it dry, and then carved it into shape. This worked somewhat, but the material has a paper-paste texture, which doesn't sand and file down to a smooth enough surface. 

Once I had the block of blue wax, I started over again on the bowl, and finished it in roughly three days, during drying time between layers of skeletal bulk in the puppets.

I made the wine bottle in one day.

The PASTA BOWL

The Fimo Air attempt

I made a milliput "casing" to protect the bowl from cracking under pressure whilst thinning the top side out.

The methods came naturally with the tools I had at my disposal. Caliper dividers, files, and sand paper, and patience.

The WINE BOTTLE

I cut a block of wax with a saw (very slowly), and marked a circle the width of the outer dimension on both ends of the block of wax. It was then just a matter of using a large file and grinding it down on all sides.

I took 2mm off the bottom since taking this picture. It seemed too long.