Body Casting - First Attempt
June 30th, 2007,It’s been a remarkably productive week for me. I’ve been full of that strange, relentless urge to do, and have tossed aside all those lame excuses that prevent us from fulfilling such urges.
One particular task I finally got around to was trying out Body Double for body casting. The energy surrounding the project idea got pretty high, and we ended up exceeding our supplies (I had enough to do about a face or two, and we tried to do a full body cast). Particularly frustrating was the fact that we could only find one roll of plaster bandages.
None the less, we did manage to get something out of the casting, and I learned quite a few things:
1) A working time of five minutes includes the time you spend stirring.
2) Using small cups of mixture at a time results in less waste, and better results
3) Always buy twice as much as you think you’ll need.
Working shots below the cut:
After trying to mix a giant pot of the casting agent, I realized that I had spent 3 of the 5 minutes of “working time” stirring. We quickly apply the casting agent to our nubile, barely-legal model.
Even without the poor choice for mixing, we still had far too little material for the surface area we wanted to work with — upper lip to mid-thigh, and 270 degrees around. Instead we barely covered from chest to groin, and only about 90 degrees around.
Pretty soon, we just had to tear chunks of congealing rubber out of the pot, and hastily shove it into the gaps we had left.
Even without the poor choice for mixing, we still had far too little material for the surface area we wanted to work with — upper lip to mid-thigh, and 270 degrees around. Instead we barely covered from chest to groin, and only about 90 degrees around.
Luckily, the one package of plaster bandages we found was enough to cover the surface area we had covered. The dowel rods create a flat plane to lay the inverted shell on later, when we create the postive, and the plaster shell is acting merely as a support structure for the negative mold.
Our plan had been to cast a cloudy, semi-translucent plastic into the mold, and wire it as a wall-hanging lamp. In this shot, I ruefully examine the inadequate shell to support the on/off pull chain I had planned.
Body Double’s layering method shows a stunning amount of detail in the hand, considering that the entire process took less than two hours, including set up. Compare this to the four hours I spent inside the alginate/plaster shell when I learned the technique (my instructor had admitted that the alginate had probably lost some of its chemical potency during it’s long period in storage, but I argue that it’s just another point in favor of a two-part chemical, which is completely inert until mixed.)