Mold Making, Day 2

Kind of a light day. I was pretty wiped out from yesterday, and the 100 degree heat made it seem like a good day to take the kids to the pool.

Here's what it looked like at the end of the day Monday.





And here's a pretty good shot of the registration bars that Justin suggested. When you're making a rubber mold, you're essentially making two molds. There's the rubber, which (hopefully) captures the surface of the sculpture. Then there's the mother mold, which captures the underlying form. We tend to focus on the surface (that's where the features are, details, and evidence of the artist's hand are), but surface without form makes no sense. Without a solid, well-registered mother mold, the sculpture will bend and distort, and all those lovely surface details will be a moot point.



First thing Tuesday was clean-up, after which I made sure everything was lubed up (more vaseline and mineral spirts), and then built the clay wall for the first piece of the multi-part mother mold. Building a multi-part mold is like building a large, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle where the pieces are defined by the topology of the underlying rubber, and by how easily the individual pieces will come apart and go back together. The goal is strike balance between fewest number of pieces and ease of release. It's complicated, and after I got the head done, I decided to do the rest of it on Wednesday.