Figurines!

[Leorgathar]

I've been having this idea for a while, that I could take materials I use to make prosthetics for my patients and use them to build small character figurines.
I finally got to try it with this last Secret Santa with this Shenzi figurine I made for CGW, she requested something hyena-related, and since I couldn't get anything here, I used this chance as my guinea pig



It's made of acrylic resin, then hand-painted with acrylic paint, but it's first based in a model made of wax. I can practically do any character as long as it's not a very complicated pose and easy to mold in wax. I still need to do a few more of these to improve the technique (I'm working on a cub Simba one now), but I intend to do figurine commissions at some point, if anyone is interested I'll post more information about it when I'm ready to do them.

Here are some pics I took of the making process


First I made this basic structure with dental pink wax. From here I kept on adding more to the body and using a knife for shaping it based in pictures of Shenzi.


Bad quality photo :P Here it's almost done, I used the green modelling wax for areas that needed more detail, like the paws and the face (it's a harder wax than the pink one)


Here's the finished wax model, yaaaay!


A cast is then made from the wax model. The model is destroyed (aww man, all that work it took to do it D: ), but we now have a negative cast in plaster (woo hoo! ^^)


I lack pics from this step on, but here's a quick explanation: The acrylic resin is then made by mixing its polymer (powder) with its monomer (liquid). The resin is poured into the cast and the cast is shut tight, then it's sumerged in boiling water for 1 hour 30 mins. After taking it out and cooling it down, the cast is opened again and the acrylic figurine is carefully retrieved (like in the picture). After this, the figurine is polished, and finally it's painted with acrylic paint (the best part, imo xD).

Maybe sometime I'll do a more detailed step-by-step, but at least I could give you an idea of how it's done. Basically, if you can have the wax model done, the rest is piece of cake

[nathalie]

Wauw, that is really cool!

[cleargreenwater]

Oh good, you do have pictures!

Holy hell. That is so completely insane and awesome. Wow, wow-wow-wow :O

So you did a real plaster cold cast? I thought you just built it up like a clay, what a cool freakin project.

Here's some close up pictures finally, sorry I'm terrible with posting pictures in a timely fashion D:

The paw pads, which is seriously impressive detail, NEVER would've thought it was all done in dental wax: 2013-01-23 20.31.15.jpg

The hair/mane, which I hope it shows up but it reminds me so much of the mane on the vintage action figures, it's solid but shows hair scruff just like that 2013-01-23 20.32.35.jpg

And attempt at a whole picture but the lighting isn't the best:2013-01-23 20.34.01.jpg

Amazed at the creativity as much as the workmanship, too. I'm way too used to thinking of TLK fandom as drawing, this *literally* totally breaks the mold XD

[KanuTGL]

Wah, it seems I completely forgot to reply to this thread

Either way, that is so, so cool, Leor! It's amazing that you made a cast of it and everything; I am seriously impressed! Really, really awesome work

[Kasei]

Woah, so cool! So can you make a mold and mass-produce castings? Or do you have to break the mold every time you make one? Because if you can keep it you could churn out some serious character sculpture commissions just by casting a few basic forms. This is really neat! I remember doing a project like this in school and wishing I had all of those tools available to me. We made ours out of aluminum though. Post more photos if you make more, this is neat!

[Azerane]

Ugh, read this before but forgot to comment. It really came out quite awesome, CGW wasn't exaggerating. Tonnes of detail and you've really gone to a lot of work. Very cool Leor

[Leorgathar]

Thank you all for your comments, I really appreciate it ^^

Woah, so cool! So can you make a mold and mass-produce castings? Or do you have to break the mold every time you make one? Because if you can keep it you could churn out some serious character sculpture commissions just by casting a few basic forms. This is really neat! I remember doing a project like this in school and wishing I had all of those tools available to me. We made ours out of aluminum though. Post more photos if you make more, this is neat!

Unfortunately no, I can't mass produce the casting because I have to break the mold, precisely. But making the cast is pretty much the easiest step. The hardest part is building the wax model, really.
Now here's the thing, I can't mass produce the acrylic figurines from one casting in plaster, but I'm looking into an alternative, which is mass producing the wax model instead. I actually played around a bit with it and took some pictures, so here's how it works:


For this little excercise I used a realistic lion figurine (It would be much better with a TLK figurine, but I don't have any -.-). Instead of making a cast of it with plaster, I covered it with silicone, a material I use to make precise dental impressions.


I cut and removed the silicone in parts carefully without deforming the material much, and gluing back together the sections I need to keep together.


Then I just melted some blocks of modelling wax and poured it in liquid form in the silicone cast.


After it hardens, the wax parts are taken out of the mold, and since it's wax, it's just a matter of putting it all together and melting the divisions together. And there, we have now a wax duplicate of the figurine! ^^

....Unfortunately, I realized later that it's too big to fit in the aluminium muffle to make the plaster cast and the acrylic resin figurine (silly me ), but yeah, this is the method I would use if I were to mass produce figurines. And they don't necessarily have to be exact duplicates, after getting the wax model, it can be modified to add different features, and maybe a slightly different pose, even. I would just need to get a common TLK figurine (or make one, if I can) to have as a default

[Kasei]

That is really stinkin' cool! I made a wax casting when I was taking a Sculpture class in college and I remember the process was really fun but it seemed like you needed such expensive materials and tons of mechanical equipment to make it happen. But it looks like you are not needing much at all. Then again, we were doing aluminum casting so maybe that's why we used so much expensive stuff. We had to use silicate powder to make ours for some reason that I can't recall, and it freaked me out because I was afraid to breathe it in and get cancer or something. I think it was a powdered version of the mold material you use. Is that dental silicone you use something you can only purchase as an oral hygenist?

As far as the wax model-making goes I remember quite enjoying carving mine. It was like carving soap or something, though I suppose the quality of your wax can make a huge difference as I would imagine the super flaky stuff would be very breakable and hard to work with when getting the finer details in. The nice thing about wax though is that you can always melt it back together and re-carve, right? xD