The Gothic Unicorn is a great mystery.
If you are unfamiliar with this piece, The “Gothic Unicorn” is a funny looking goat-like unicorn sculpture, with a poofy llama tail.
He is retired in the white color, but I had always intended to paint him in other colors.
The mystery about him is…what happened to him?
The epoxy master, along with the master “case”, has turned up missing. The “case” is a crucial piece of tooling that is used to pour the molds; it forms the outside shape of the rubber mold and is precisely fitted to the master sculpture.
The Gothic unicorn master was missing in California, but I figured surely it would show up when we moved. We took the whole California Windstone factory apart, looked in every storage box, and .. no Gothic unicorn master. I admit, we loose stuff often, but how on earth could we of LOST a finished PRODUCTION epoxy master AND case? The combined master, thick acrylic bottom plate, and case were pretty big and heavy; they must of weighed nearly twenty pounds! They wouldn’t even fit into a box easily!
All we know is, they are gone!
Luckily, we did find what appears to be a precious “master mold”. This is a picture of it. This mold was was stored with a plaster casting inside of it so that it wouldn’t shrink too much, but it is probably very old and fragile. Hopefully we can still pour a usable new master from this mold and start over again. If this doesn’t work, re-making this piece may not be worth doing. To re-do EVERYTHING, starting with a production casting and reworking it would require almost as much re-detailing and mold work as starting from scratch on a new sculpture. May as well do something new!
The suspense mounts…
Hey, of course! That mold and casting are sitting on the master plate! That means the case and master are stored separately from each other…somewhere on the earth…so how did we loose both???
I hope you can find the missing epoxy master and “case” or cast a new master from the mold you found. I would hate to see the Gothic unicorn gone forever.
As the price of Gothic Unicorns shoot up on ebay………
That sucks. Can’t you cast an unpainted one, or do you not have any?
Yes we would need to go to a production piece to re-do it… but that would be almost as much work as starting over again. It is possible that the casting in this mold could be usable as a master.The key thing the master must have is EXACT registration with the plate and outside tooling.This casting almost has that. The reason this casting it isn’t QUITE a perfect master is that each successive casting expands, so it is slightly larger than the original master, but maybe the expansion is not enough to matter!
We are going to try to use this mold and see what we get! Might work!
Oh noes =(
Well, if John Hammond can bring dinos back, lets hope the Gothic Unicorn doesn’t stay extinct for long =P
No sooner was this written than one appeared on eBay. He’s already at $104 with a whole week left to go. It’s eBay no. 130304722538 if you are interested.