Sollux Horns - Casting on Porcelain

It's been a while since I've worked on these!  The reason being that my basement is being torn up, and I have to do all of my ceramic work there since it's so messy.  I took a day and managed to make a work space for myself though, so here goes!

Supplies!  I have a ton of Ultra Chic porcelain slip left over from my individual study in college, so I'm going to use what I have lying around.  Other than that I have a strainer, an old coffee pot to pour with, and a mold!  I have to strain the porcelain before using it to make sure it pours smoothly.

All poured into the mold!  My mold is all dry right now so it's going to cast pretty quickly.  So that I can gauge when I need to pour the excess porcelain slip out I poured some on top.  Once that little extra bit on top is dry I can pour the liquid center out.

Letting the porcelain drip out!  I didn't think about it when making the mold, but it's a little awkward to cast both horns at once since they're spaced just so that they won't pour back into the slip jar.

After they're all poured out here I have a shell of slip inside my mold, woo!

After giving it some time for the porcelain to harden a little more in the mold I pull it apart.  You know it's time to pull the mold apart either when it come apart without any pulling, or the porcelain starts to pull away from the edges. The porcelain shrinks a little as it dries.

Carefully pull it out of the mold.  Be gentle, porcelain is very fragile before firing!

Cut off the pour hole, it's junk.

Lastly you clean up the seam lines a little, I drilled some holes so that I would have something to firmly attach them with.  Firing comes next!  I'm waiting until I have a few pairs to fire so that I'll have extras, and that may take another week or so since I have to wait until the mold is dry enough for me to cast more.

Back to horns!

I haven't done anything with these horns since my basement flooded which really kept me from being able to work on these for a while.

I realized that I was going to have to figure out a way to attach these to a head.  Unfortunately it would have been better if I had thought about it sooner and I could have attached something inside the wax while it wax casting.  The wax doesn't bond to itself very well, it prefers to stay in layers if you do that, but I think this will work?

It's really not idea :(  It makes me want to just move on the the porcelain ones, but my ceramics room is still out of order from the flood.

Wax Castings

So here's the horns all cast!

You can see where they pulled a little bit of plaster out of the inside of the mold, so that means I didn't put enough mold release in before I poured them, but that should come off without much problem!  I also will need to clean up the parting line, since the texture gets interrupted.

I think I got the thickness about right!  I wanted them thick enough that they weren't going to fall apart, but thin enough that they were still very translucent.

Both pairs!  They still need cleaning up, and I haven't cut off the pour holes yet so they'll be shorter than this, but they're shaping up!  I'm trying to decide how to paint them so that they keep their translucency?

Casting in Wax

Well, the mold is finally done!  It would have been better if I had been able to do it without and leaks or problems, but whatever!

I decided to do a cast in wax first, since it's very easy and very quick.  Also, when casting in wax I've heard it's better to have a wet mold, and since the mold was still all wet from being made what better time!  To cast in porcelain you need to have a dry mold, so it would be silly for me to wait for it to dry, cast in porcelain, then wet it and cast in wax?  Not to mention getting molds wet again and again is what causes them to degrade faster.

For the wax I just grabbed a bunch of old candles, I'm sure there's some kind of better wax I could order online that would be more sturdy (or something?).  But this was just a little thing, so candle wax works!

I used a double boiler to melt the wax, since wax can be flammable, so you want to be a little careful, and not leave it alone on the stove! 

I use these large rubber bands to hold my molds together, since I usually work with small molds they don't need a whole lot of tension to keep them closed.  One day I'll invest in some real mold straps.

Once the wax is melted though all you have to do is pour it in the mold, super easy!

I wanted hollow horns, since they would be more translucent, and less heavy.  So all I had to do was keep an eye on the molds until a thick enough shell had hardened around the edges, pour out the excess wax that was still liquid in the middle, and wait for it to cool!

Pictures tomorrow of the horns coming out of the mold!

It's all okay

Well, despite the problems with the first half of the mold that I had, it ended up okay anyways!  The thing about plaster is that if you've done it on a smooth surface, it's much much easier to clean up if you wait for it to set up, and can just chip it up in large chunks.

Pretty easy!

I was so glad that the texture came out just fine in the plaster!  I was a little bit worried about it, since in some spots the texture was a little deeper.  Since plaster isn't flexible at all you have to be careful about very small thin details.

I took the horns out of this half of the mold, cleaned them up and put them back in.  I also had to put a little more plasticine to keep the pour hole open!  This time I had to put vaseline over the horns AND the plaster, since otherwise if I pour more plaster on top it would seal the two halves together, and the whole mold would be useless!

Boxed back up!  This time I made absolutely 100% certain that there were NO GAPS.  Thankfully this time there was no leaking problem, so the mold will be finished soon!

Plaster ruins everything

When I last left off it was the last step in mold making before getting into plaster.  Plaster is notoriously messy, but easy to work with.  It's just two ingredients, water and powder, and you don't have to do anything but mix them and wait.

You always want to use cold water, since it will extend the length of time you have to work with it before it sets up.  I usually work with a 2:1 plaster to water ratio, maybe a little bit more plaster to thicken it up.  The thicker the mix is the harder the plaster will set up, which is something you want, but you can't be working with pudding or there will be too many bubbles to worry about.

So here's the inside of the box!  You can see there are gaps where the clay doesn't meet the sides perfectly.  Those all need to be filled very carefully!  You do not want leaks!

At this point I thought that everything was sealed up.  It looks sealed up, right?  Well, apparently it wasn't, because when I poured the plaster...

There is a limited number of options when this happens.  If it's a slow leak, and your plaster is setting up fast (if it's fresh and you used warmer water it will go faster) you can hope for the best.  I was not so lucky, my plaster is a bit old and I had two fast leaks.

From that standpoint I had two options.  One, just let it go, come back later when it's all set up, and take it all apart and start all over with the mold making process.  Or two, try to plug up the holes where you see them with clay and either mix more plaster to pour in or try to scoop up what leaked out and pour it back in.  I did the latter, and it worked out?  This was just a silly little mold for fun, so I wasn't too concerned about it having problems.

I managed to get enough plaster back into there that it was thick enough, sure was a mess though.

My poor shoes, they were not so lucky :(

I hate mold making

You would think with all of the molds that I've made I would be good at making molds by now?

But it is not so, inevitably every few molds disaster will strike, especially if it's been a while since I've made one.  I was too confident in thinking that just making one very small mold would be easy ^^;

It also doesn't help that the messy room I use for making molds and casting is kind of creepy, so I'm always a little bit on edge in there.  It used to have a window to outside but the previous owner of our house added a tool workshop right onto the side.  So instead of this window looking outside it looks out into a dark, messy workshop.  I need to get curtains, or paint those windows or something...

Plaster, my old nemesis...  At one point in my life I was going through more bags of this than I could buy locally.  25lbs of plaster sounds like a lot, but when you're using it to make molds it goes REALLY fast.  You just need a lot of square inches of plaster to get it done!  You can get these bags at home depot or other hardware stores usually.  But you should try to buy FRESH plaster too!  It makes stronger molds that will last longer.  But unless you've worked with plaster a lot it's probably not a noticeable difference.

Okay make sure to lube everything up!  One day I'll invest in a spray mold release, but for now vaseline is cheap.  You want to put on enough so that everything is very slick, but not so much that you fill in details with it.  I only need to put it on the horns this time around, since I used oil clay it will naturally repel the plaster!

These are molding boards!  They're not too useful for much else, but they're pretty easy to make.  The point of them is that they're easy to clamp together tightly.  My father made these ones for me and varnished them so that they would repel the plaster without me having to vaseline them first.  I usually vaseline them anyways to be sure though.

Here's how they clip together!  You see how?  They clip together this way so that they can be made to fit any dimension mold.  C-clamps are cheaper, but I got these in a pack at the hardware store for like $20 and since I make a lot of molds it was worth it to me.

Be ready for the impending disaster tomorrow...

The beginnings of a mold

I make it no secret that I hate making molds.  After putting myself in a situation in which I had to finish 45 molds in one semester I pretty much molded myself out.  I can take it in small doses now, but try to be careful not to do more than one or two at a time.  Screw that professor that said I could pursue a career in mold making.

These are the two tools that I used to make the texture, I don't know what the rubber thing is I found it in a box of colored pencils and kept it.  The other is just a needle tool!

The horns all baked and ready for the beginnings of mold making!

Step one, draw a line through the exact middle!  Without going into very specific details, it's so that I can avoid undercuts.  Since I'm making a two part mold for these I have to be pretty careful about where I place the line where the two halves of the mold will meet, otherwise, since this is a cylindrical object, the horn might get locked into the plaster if more than half is on either side.  If you're interested in mold making there are a ton of great tutorials you can find through google!

 Here's all the supplies I need to make the mold (besides plaster)!
-A flat board like thing to build the base on
-Plasticine, or oil clay
-Vaseline, or some other mold release
-Object to cast!

So here's the base after I made it!  I built the plasticine up around the sides of the horns to the lines I drew marking the halfway point.  I also make sure that there is about an inch of free space around each object.  I was lazy and am making one mold for the two horns, since man do I hate making molds.

I did my best to make it flat, though it doesn't have to be perfect.  The more perfect it is the longer the mold will last, but I can't imagine this one will need to last very long.  I remembered to put in the keys (little round dots) and pour holes, next I have to Vaseline the horns so they'll release and box it up and pour plaster!

Texture

Well I tried looking at a whole lot of horns through google search and tried to figure out what texture to go with?  I tried to look at goat horns mostly, since according to wiki most things we think of as 'horns' are actually 'antlers' which are a different thing.

So I ended up looking at a lot of goat horns, which have a really kind of subtle texture, kind of like really flaky fingernails?  I kept it in mind, but just wasn't sure how to get it to be quite so subtle.

First I tried just poking lines into it.  Okay, but I wasn't quite sold I guess, something looks wrong.

Tried making it more subtle, made it worse, doh!

Decided on this texture, I carved a line into it, then with a rubber tool I smoothed the lower edge down.  I don't think I'm describing it well, but maybe you can see what I mean?

You can see the difference between the lines that are just carved (upper portion) and the ones that I've smoothed.

Small horn done, large one left to go!  It ended up looking awfully 'wrinkly' once I was done, but I still kind of like it I think.  I also have to keep in mind that it's really going to look different in a more translucent material.

Horns

Well, I have no plans to cosplay ever, but I enjoy making costumes anyways?  I've mentioned Homestuck before, and half the characters from that are trolls with horns.  I look at a lot of Homestuck cosplay photos from conventions and it kills me to see a nicely done cosplay but with lumpy terrible paper mache horns.

I just felt like making some quality horns I guess?  I'm starting out with sculpey and plan to make a mold and cast them in something more translucent.  I could have started out working with translucent sculpey I guess, but this way I can just work with materials I've already got, without having to actually buy something for kind of a bogus project.

Sollux has two pairs of horns since he's the character that represents Gemini, one larger pair and one smaller.  Since I'm making a mold I only have to make one of each horn, and I can cast it more than once.

I started out by drawing what I thought the right size was for each horn and cutting it out, then putting it on my head and checking to see if the size was right.  This is just a guide so I don't go completely out of whack on scale and end up with giant horns!

I used tin foil to make the base because since sculpey needs to be baked, it has to have a core to work on that can also be baked.  Tin foil is really not an ideal material for smoothness, but it serves its purpose if you work at it for a few minutes.  Also make sure to make the tin foil models SMALLER than you want the horns.

Roll out the sculpey, I did pretty thin since I didn't have a whole lot of orange to work with ^^;  I also made the tin foil base accordingly, only slightly smaller than the finished size I wanted.

Just rolled onto the horn!  It looks pretty terrible right now, but we're working on it.

To make sure it will look like it's coming out of someone's head you want it to have crisp corners, not rounded!  I do a lot of smoothing sculpey with a knitting needle actually.  I never had much luck pushing or running my fingers over the clay to blend it, so I use the knitting needle and 'roll' it over the clay.

Mostly smooth now and pretty close to what I had drawn up before!  At this point if I wanted the finished horns to be smooth I would bake, sand and finish, but I wanted to play with texture.  Since I plan to cast these in a translucent material small lumps will also be less of an issue.  The sculpey I used is very opaque, so any imperfection in the surface is very visible.

More on texture tomorrow!