Saturday, May 19, 2012

Mold Making 101 (not really)

 I know that some of the two of you who watch this may know how all this is done, as you learned it with me, or from the same course, but some may not...

Molds are deceptively simple, they just require a certain kind of thinking. The big idea is to encase the object into a solid surface that will take it's impression, and then be able to open that solid surface whenever you want.
On a simple two part mold this is easy enough to do, by building a wall around the shape that you have created or want to make a replica of.

Then using some kind of plaster like material cover one half of the shape. It is important to keep a sharp edge between the wall that you made, and the shape you want to reproduce, this will help with seaming in the future (I'll discuss this in a future post).
 This image is of the head half done, there's a few things to point out here, I have removed my original wall that haloed the sculpt, and there are some 'dots' in the wall. These are called 'keys' and allow the two parts of the mold to fit together perfectly after it is made, so if it taken apart and put back together multiple times it'll still fit together easily and the same way every time.
The last step is to cover the opposite side in the plaster, the first half of the mold acts as the wall that was originally placed around the sculpt this time. Also I added two pry points into the mold giving me the option to poke something in to them and pull the mold apart if need be.

In a future post, I'll talk about some of the more troublesome aspects of mold making, like undercuts and seaming.

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