Alien Drinking Hole 3

The Alien Drinking Hole is painted in a purple with red accept scheme.  Base coat was first a spray of black paint, then a spray of purple paint.  The rough ribbed base dry brushed easily, taking coats of paint with little effort.  As usual, I had a bit of trouble with highlights.  First efforts were done with purple mixed with bleach bone, but I was left with an underwhelming pasty color.  At that point, I added red as an accent & pounded on the high lights to bring the eye up the body of the terrain.  Final touch is a bit of two part water effect in the basin to add the “drinking” portion of the “hole.”  The water effect is tinted with a bit of orange, but the ink effect is very minimal.

 

Alien Drinking Hole 2

Sculpting for the alien drinking hole is complete. A standard one-piece mold was created to copy the base of the hole, but for the tusks – I was able to try out my first 2 part mold. Art clay worked like a charm to hold the master while the first layer of RTV was poured. I used Smooth-On’s Universal Mold Release to little effect, the RTV halves firmly bonded to each other. My only recourse was to cut the master out of the rubber. Fortunately, the RTV smoothly cut away from the master, giving me a functional mold. Four casts later & I have all the parts to complete the project.

   

Alien Drinking Hole

A Tyranid drinking hole – even the horde needs to stop to refresh and refuel.

My first large scale sculpting effort, created for the Terra Genesis Drinking Spot competition.  The drinking hole is based on a CD & is sculpted primarily from Apoxie Sculpt with smaller details in ProCreate.  The goal is to create a sucking orifice with four upright tusks.  The form begins with a one inch layer of Apoxie that is worked with a dental pick to create the woody exterior.  The rim then has small mouths & tentacles added to break up the consistent pattern.  The interior of the hole is a thin layer of Apoxie with impressions mass-produced using a stamp.  Exterior detail on the four tusk bases is added as horizontal bands with small sucker holes made with a piece of aluminum tubing.

The tusks are a curved horn of Apoxie over a wire armature.  I was forced to use a bit of ProCreate to detail the curve – the Apoxie would not hold the small amounts of detail that the smaller surface required.  The last remaining step is to create a plug that will slot into the tusk base.  The finished tusk will then be cast in a mold to create the set of four pieces.

      

Site Review: Shifting Lands

Shifting Lands is the home of Geboom and his marvelous resin cast boats, buildings and docks. The linked page takes you to a tutorial on how he builds his manor house kits but be sure to roam about the whole site.

The tutorial boils down to four steps:

• build a rough structure with exact over all measurements
• construct a mold & cast the rough in plaster
• carve incredible detail into the plaster
• construct a new mold & cast the detailed pieces in resin

Aside from the “insert artistic ability here” step, the process is a good guild to scratch building large objects using plaster as a base. One modification to this process that may save a bit of RTV would be to use the craft foam method developed by Dlmos. The craft foam process uses layers of 2mm foam to create a rough mold for plaster casting. No great amount of detail is going to be applied by the foam mold, but that’s OK – the goal is to create a basic (but accurate) shape to carve on.

In a way, you could call Geboom a graduate of the Hirst school of plaster. His earlier works with the Hirst blocks show a great deal of creativity but it appears that he has grown beyond the Hirst bricks and moved on to 100% self created projects. I see more and more of this sort of thing happening on the Hirst message boards – long time builders having been exposed to casting & mold making skills are now busy on their own projects.