Foundry - Polygons in Bronze: Part 9

The bronze was just the beginning. Now I must create a base for my cat to sit upon. My initial idea when I first started this project was a cloud made of plaster. Then, I explored other ideas which incorporated different materials and subject matter. I settled on a cloud made of concrete. Then I ran out of time, couldn't reliably cast concrete nor give it enough time to set... and went back to using plaster.

The cloud was roughly modeled and sculpted in blender, then I used a cloth simulation to make it even more puffy before taking it into ZBrush. Inspired by the cloud design I made last semester, I added clockwise and counter-clockwise swirls. Then, I flattened a spot for the cat to sit on top and extended the bottom to be flat and allow me to capture all of the detail of the clouds with my cast. I further refined it, added a hole for a transducer (a conductive speaker), and then converted it into a negative of itself. To do this, I cut the shape out of a cube. I brought the cube into my 3D printer's slicing software where I added proportional thickness to the entire model (could do it in blender but so much easier using a slicer) and then moved it back into blender where I removed the now unnecessary cube shape that surrounded the mold.

Once the mold was printed (again using resin), I processed the print and sanded the bumps left behind by the support structure. I didn't spend enough time on this sanding step and that caused problems later on.

Next, I glued a plastic jug to the cylinder cutout and poured the plaster. Retrieving the plaster from the mold was much harder than I thought. The resin I used was not as brittle as I was expecting it to be (usually a blessing, now a curse) and I had to split it into tiny little pieces using some extremely low-quality wood carving chisels that did not survive the process. Once the plaster was free of the resin mold, I could see some divots left by support bumps as well as chips and nicks caused by my crude removal techniques.

To fill these problem areas, I mixed up some more plaster and painted it on with a paintbrush. Things were going so smoothly... until it dried to a brownish hue. The texture was also a bit off so maybe I just had a bad batch of plaster for this skim coat. Either way, it was not good.

To fix my new mistake, I started sanding. Sanding. Sanding. Until I gave up. The sandpaper kept getting caked in plaster, which was still not fully dry. I grabbed some chisels and started carving away the bad areas. After many hours of sanding and carving, it was in an ok state but no matter what, the plaster needed something else if I wanted it to look even somewhat OK.