Dog child

28 May 2011

I’ve been making latex moulds of limbs all week.  It requires more patience than skill – you dip whatever you want duplicated in the latex and wait for it to dry.  Half an hour later, you add some thickener to the latex, dip  again, wait an hour to dry.  This goes on and on, so you have five or six layers, and drying time gets longer, or it did when I was doing it anyway.  Oh, and I forgot to say, first you make some kind of drying rack for your pieces to suspend them from any surfaces.  I didn’t do that first, I realised I should have done that before the first dipping, after I’d done the first dipping.  So once I’d removed the ick and the newspaper, I took a piece of wood and whacked some three inch nails into it to skewer my limbs.  When I said it required more patience than skill, a little skill might have come in handy.

But anyway, I am there.  I have seven moulds of arms and legs and hands and feet and a seashell.  The seashell was an impulse mould after I’d realised I’d mixed too much latex thickener, but I am sure it will come in handy for something later.  The trickiest bit will come next…I want to cast with clear resin and to be frank, I’ve never done this before and am a bit terrified.  The resin won’t be as forgiving as the latex, and I am more likely to get into an undoable muddle, given my cack-handed approach.  I need to work out how to support the moulds while I pour the resin in, and am thinking perhaps placing them in a tub of soft sand might to the trick.  I am not an idiot, I have used my googling powers to research this.  The last piece of advice I read was to prop up the mould with paint tins.  This doesn’t sound very SAFE!  What with the chemical reaction happening as soon as you add the hardener to the resin. I can imagine the whole darn shooting match tumbled over, and caught like that in water clear resin forever as a glowing example of my ineptitude.  I think I will need a cup of tea before I take this any further.  Here’s a dog child to look at in the meantime.  He has flutterable eyelashes, but you’ll not see that in this still image.  They’re very fetching.