Week 10-11 - November 2018 - Repetition + Balance, Silicone Casting

Silicone casts of these small toy hands. I used two little rubber hands for the items I made casts of. They are a pair of hands, right and left, so I chose to cast the front of one hand, and the back of the other. The hands are supposed to go on your fingers, so that it looks like you have tiny hands, so they're hollow inside where your finger goes. I filled them with oil based clay so that my plaster cast wouldn't get inside them. I poured plaster into a container and then pressed the plastic hands into them and let them sit for about 24 hours so the mold was completely dry, then removed the hands to reveal the mold. I mixed up a mixture of green and blue food coloring, silicone, and corn starch to make the rubber I used for pressing into the mold. The first round of hands that I made are the two that are the darker green color. Then for the second batch of hands I used less food coloring, and apparently more corn starch than the first ones, because they're a lot lighter in color, and feel less rubbery, and more starchy. These second two hands didn't come out quite as nicely as the first two for some reason. I copied the recipe for "proto putty" that was attached in the assignment instructions, and I remember the narrator in the video said that the food coloring helped to activate the hardening of the silicone, so maybe because I added less food coloring to the second batch is why they came out with a little different consistency. I pressed a large blob of the silicone mixture into the mold, and then once it was dry I popped it out and used an x-acto knife to cut away extra rubber from around the hands. I attached the hands to the green apple with toothpicks.