(way more than) 30 day tiny? - new faceplate

This morning I poured the first half of Inkling's molds. They're in the pressurepot now, though I opened the pot a few hours ago to see if they needed to be topped off after pressurizing. I guess I thought that there being so many airbubbles, the silicone level would have dropped more. The molds looked like they were doing great, so I pressurized it again. I could technically start removing the clay tonight around eleven, but I'm going to let it all percolate overnight and start pulling out the clay in the morning.


Here are all my little mother molds pre-pour... there are 16. :dead It makes everything take so long. When I do a bigger doll, I know it'll be even worse. I haaaaaaate molding.


Here is my pressure setup. This is my compressor, Spitfire, and my pressurepot, Behemoth. Spitfire is a big, loud compressor that can go up to 155 psi. Behemoth is a 10 gallon pot that maxes out at 80psi. I got Behemoth for a song from a friend, otherwise I would have had the same 2.5 gallon pot everyone else does! As big as he is, the interior isn't optimized for multiple molds because it's just a big empty area... I am hoping to build shelves to put inside to hold more molds at a time. (All of Inkling's molds fit side by side, happily.)

I can't remember if I mentioned it before, but Behemoth was not pressurizing... and it was because he needed one piece that didn't come with the pot. It came as a lucky extra with my compressor, though! Firefly helped me to make it all work together.


I'm posting this for the benefit of anyone who buys one of the CA Technologies pots. You'll need the piece indicated by the red arrow. You can get it cheap at Home Depot if it doesn't come with your compressor.

I hope to have some viable casts by mid-week.

 

Opening the pot didn't seem to do anything - it's was mostly set at that point. It was 12 of 16 hours in.... I think you may have just had the silicone from hell.

Tonight I poured the other halves of the mold. I'd wanted to do it last night, but we were so busy... we ripped out a wall of hedges in my front yard then had dinner guests. Such a transition already, adding moldmaking would have been too much!


Here's the view of the molds in the pot. The Dragon Skin is translucent like the cheaper MoldMax 27T. They look a lot alike, but everything about them is different!


Here are the mold pieces getting a blast of mold release so that the second pour doesn't stick...

Tonight I poured the other halves... here's to hoping nothing goes wrong! I had some trouble with my pot earlier (I couldn't get it sealed well enough!) but things seem to be okay now.

I'm beat... heading to bed. Tomorrow I can demold and see how the molds came out! Excited!

 

Finished!














I'm tired tonight... I'll write more about it all tomorow!

 

Thanks so much for the comments on her.

I am thrilled to death with how she came out... and I am TOTALLY READY to move on to a new project. While I'm really proud, I am really bored with her now! Something new, please!

I had to remold two of her pieces... tonight I am casting her laughing face... so the first girl will be heading to her owner in a day or so. I'm so nervous that she won't like her in person! :dead

After that, I have a handful to cast to fulfill the preorder that allowed me to buy my materials and equipment... and then I'll make a production master to send off for casting by someone with more skill and better equipment. YAY! I can't wait to be at that point!

 

Inkling is off to the casting studio!



Now I just need to sand the preorder dolls and string them, then I can sit on my butt for a few weeks and let someone else do the work.

In casting the preorder dolls, I ended up with some "off casts" in colors that weren't what I was aiming for. I had trouble with getting consistent translucency in all of the pieces... the prototype ended up being one of my miscasts. It doesn't matter if she is all the same color because she'll just be used to make a mold. Task 3 has an opaque white sediment that settles to the bottom and just shaking it isn't enough - you need to scrape it with a spatula.

The pro-cast dolls will all be white and normal skin. My personal molds are dead (:dead) but I'll be remaking them in a few weeks so I can continue to cast different colored dolls. I would really like to do an edition of all different human skintones. I intentionally made Inkling's features racially ambiguous, so she's worked well in the colors I've attempted so far. In the going away pic above, you can see a deep tan/brown doll.... she was technically an accident on the way to normal tan, but I really like her. Next time I want to do a really deep brown tinged with blue.

I feel like over the last year or two, I've become more racially conscious... and while I still don't really have a problem with the lack of dark skintones in Asian-made BJD, I am not Asian and I don't come from a homogenous culture. If I can offer more options, that can hardly be seen as a bad thing. My only concern is that I am afraid that I am going to inadvertently offend someone like the 80's "palette switch" that birthed the first African American Barbie. However, looking at Inkling in brown, I think it suits her face about as well as any other color.



Sorry if this isn't so coherent, I'm home sick today. :dead

 

Thanks for the encouragement on these girls... and reassurance about coloration.

I'm happy because I shipped out the preorder dolls, so now I can relax a bit. I have one modification commission to complete, then I'll go back in and do the finishing on the other three sets of pieces that I have. Three dolls, hooray. Deep tan, blue with glow in the dark, blue pearl.

I'm waiting still for the prototype to reach the factory. I sent the pieces by registered mail, so it's taking forever. AND there has apparently been no one around to accept the delivery. They've attempted delivery twice. I'm a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit twitchy. I just want them to have the pieces and tell me that everything is okay.

I need to just finish that commission, then I'm on to new sculpting as well. I AM SO EXCITED. I feel like I've been doing finishing and fiddling for months... and that is just not as fun as fresh work.

Here are some more Inklings.

 

This is all I have for that:



Though 4 people have her now, no one has posted pictures though people have said how much fun they're having with her. I think there's something about the handcasts that's very personal, so people don't really want to share her.

The glow powder doll didn't work out so well... because apparently the powder is very dense, so it sinks VERY quickly. So she isn't even colored; rather, she has deposits of the glow powder at the bottom of each piece depending on how it was oriented in the mold.



The effect is actually sort of cool in the face:


It's like she's lit from below! This was a resin test in general... I started with a clear resin that I pigmented opaque, and I added pearl powder, and I added glitter, and I added glow powder. I just wanted to see how everything worked! (The pearl was awesome, the glitter sank, and the glow powder was a bust.)

She's not available yet. I'll update when she is.

Dragon Skin is a platinum cure silicone rather than a tin cure silicone (like Moldmax). Platinum cure silicones are harder to work with because more things can inhibit the cure, but they have better properties (durability, library life, etc.) than tin cure.

That said, I was NOT impressed with Dragon Skin and I wish I'd just used Moldmax 27T, which is what I used for my junk molds. I only got 8 dolls from my molds before the silicone started tearing. Considering that the Dragon Skin cost almost double what the Moldmax did, I'm not happy at all.

Have you showed him? I'm sure he'd be excited to see. He's a local friend of mine (we went to the same high school) and he's really funny when someone does cool fanart - he gets SO psyched.

Yeah... casting is hell. I hope you get your man professionally produced! I love him and I'd love to see more of him.

Inkling arrived at the studio about two weeks ago and they're just now getting started with her. They told me last night that fixing the headback/faceplate issue wasn't a problem, and they also suggested refinements to the joints (particularly the knees). They said that some joints were "a little rough." I'm not surprised and I'm taking it on the chin and saying to go ahead and make the fixes, but I am a little wounded. Not that they would say it (I'm actually happy they'd give me feedback!) but that I didn't refine the joints enough myself. I'm happy with the quality of the hand-casts, but the pro ones will be really nice because of the changes, though, so I am getting enthused about that.

I'll post pics when they send them to me!

 

Awww, thanks Silk. I am proud of my work and my accomplishment... it's more that I just wish I'd pushed myself that little bit further. But you're right... and I think I'd been working on her too long already to really see her flaws anymore. It needed fresh eyes.

Maggs, I think the way to go might be doing a gel coat of the glow powder with a thick, quick-setting silicone and then filling the rest of the mold... so I'm not sure if it's possible with hollow pieces or two-piece molds. I was thinking something like this, only using glow powder instead of metal filler:
http://www.smooth-on.com/a84/Metal-Cold-Casting-More-Realistic-Than-Ever!/article_info.html
(I totally want to try this, btw).

Joan, the only problem with that is that I have seams and gates to remove, so there would be places without glow.

The studio said they should be sending the production sample around October 20th!!