casting material

[twindragonsmum]

tdm

[twindragonsmum]

How did you come to choose gypsum as your casting material of choice? If you had to start over from scratch would you still go with gypsum or would you try something else?

twindragonsmum 😕

tdm

[Melody]

twindragonsmum wrote:

How did you come to choose gypsum as your casting material of choice? If you had to start over from scratch would you still go with gypsum or would you try something else?

twindragonsmum 😕 I wish there was something else to choose! The only other option for largish sculpture was ceramic.The person we started the company with, Mark Hines, already had a ceramics company.The main reason Mark wanted to do these sculptures was to do something besides ceramics!
There isn’t much else to use, we ruled out resin, which was new at the time, because it was really bad for people and the planet (still is). That leaves various cast metals, and injection molded plastics. We thought hard about casting paper mache too.
It has obvious drawbacks, but gypsum is a wonderful material if you can get it to work!

[WindstoneCollector]

Speaking of Gypsum…Having any luck yet? Or are you just wanting to pull your hair out still? 😕

[kitsunelady]

I say, are these little crusty bits the problem you guys are having with the new gypsum formula?

Here’s an older one for comparison –

I darkened the pictures and increased the contrast to try and get it to show up better.

Edit : Sorry WC, I just saw your post and realized I had started mine the same. 😀 *changed it*

[Melody]

WindstoneCollector wrote:

Speaking of Gypsum…Having any luck yet? Or are you just wanting to pull your hair out still? 😕

We are all nearly bald.

[Rachel]

Out of curiosity, does anyone have ANY ideas as to why the casting isn’t going well? pH? Minerals in the water? Humidity?

[kitsunelady]

ghostndragon wrote:

Out of curiosity, does anyone have ANY ideas as to why the casting isn’t going well? pH? Minerals in the water? Humidity?

Well, the people who make the gypsum apparently changed the formula…but I’ve also wondered if the new climate (it’s got to be more humid there than LA…) has anything to do with it.

[WindstoneCollector]

Melody wrote:

WindstoneCollector wrote:

Speaking of Gypsum…Having any luck yet? Or are you just wanting to pull your hair out still? 😕

We are all nearly bald.

🙁 Poor Melody and crew.
That Ki-Rin’s mane is really weird… 😮
I’ve found a few air bubbles in a couple Griffins, just little ones no bigger than the head of a small metal pin, and they weren’t hard to fix. But nothing like that in their feathers. 😕

[Author]

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