Thank you Polytek

Molds are now finished on the male officer. The Polytek mold system worked very well.

The back half of the figure with the plastic mother mold sprayed on.  When we are working on the female figure I will try to get a volunteer to take some pictures of that process. With the two of us we can't take action shots, just too much going on.

Lester trimming the flange with a jig saw.

Lester holding the first section of mold peeled off the clay,

This shows a mold section, blue is flexible rubber, white is the plastic mother mold

All the molds fastened together with bolts. We drilled through the flange before peeling the molds apart. I managed to manhandle one of the molds and broke off part of the flange. No worries though it will still work just fine.

Stripping the clay from the armature. We save the clay for the next project.

The other side of the piece.

The arms set up and sprayed with the rubber.

This morning we sprayed on the plastic mother mold over the front half of the mold. That material goes on very quickly and sets up in a few minutes. We flipped over the sculpture and sprayed on the rubber material on the back half and sprayed the arms. Don't tell Lester but I forgot to spray release agent on one of the arms. That oversight will make getting the rubber off the clay a chore but won't hurt anything but my reputation. The rubber will cure overnight and we will then spray on the plastic mother mold.

I definitely am glad I went through the trouble of making these figures sturdy enough to lay them down. It made spraying them much easier with far less wasted material. The shop stayed cleaner too. The gun loaded with spray material weighs about 15 pounds. It is very tiring to hold up for several hours at a time while working.

Polytek Spray on rubber molds

Lester holding arm after we cut it off.  We tied and taped off the arms to keep  from deforming the surface.
This was a very stressful operation but worked out perfectly.

Figure without arms. This makes mold making easier and allows for better results,

Figure laid out to facilitate spray on mold. We supported figure in the middle to keep from deforming it.
We added shims to part the figure in half but I forgot to get pictures of that step.

After spraying, the tool in the foreground is used with cartridges for applying mold material.

Mold material applied, note the flange surrounding the figure creating a parting line for two halves of the mold.

Tomorrow we will be spraying on the plastic mother mold which will give form to the flexible rubber.
This was a stress filled day of very hard work. Everything worked as planned and tonight the rubber is curing so we can proceed to the next step.

Modeling hands in clay

That's me working on hands today and a close up of one that is finished.

Yesterday Robin from Duluth Police Dept. and Steve from St. Louis County Sheriff's Dept. came up for a preview. They are happy with the progress and gave me the go ahead to start mold making.

Lester has been making molds already of the hardware that goes on the officer's belts. The goal is to have both the figures finished and in molds by the 4th of Feb.

clay, YEA!

The female figure just before adding the first layer of clay

Clay on the figure

Working with the Plasteline clay on wire mesh is a bit hard on the fingers. Having the right amount of heat on the clay helps a lot. Posters on the wall are from the event in the studio announcing our new venture, Studio Forma, Click here for info.

Sense of Scale

This will give you a sense of how large these figures are going to be. I'm still roughing out the styro which is going to be covered with clay. This process is valuable in getting the scale implanted in my mind. It's a bit harder to work larger than life than smaller. For some reason our minds are really tuned to life size and reluctant to accommodate the bigger scale.

My, You are a big girl!

DPA Armatures

Here are the armatures welded up. I used the drawings on the floor to size these. Think of them as skeletons to hold the foam and clay up. Tomorrow I will be gluing foam insulation board over these to fill out and roughly shape the figures. Got 240 pounds of Chavant sulphur free plasteline clay today. This is an oil based clay that will not dry out while I'm sculpting. In the past I have used water based clay and spent far too much time trying to keep the clay the correct level of damp. The plasteline will eliminate that time drain.