Casting

My original fish for the plaster casting project was very large. We made a wooden support for him so that he would he completely 3D to be hung. It was hard to scale him down because the wooden support was a bit large.

 We used 3 tubes of clear silicone calking which ended up being a bit chunky on the outside

 The master mold was made of plaster and turned out ok. The biggest problem was that the tail portion of the fish was lower than the poor spout we created

 When the plasrer was poured we kept ending up with chunks missing out of the tail. After three castings I found that if the plaster is poured earlier while still wet and then sloshed up I could fill in the tail.

Bubbles were formed from the liquidy plaster being poured early and fast. The big fish was not working out very well and was too large anyways. I decided to go home and just start over with a smaller fish like I originally had designed

 I made the second fish out of sculpey. I made two of them much smaller with fairly simple designs as my sculpey was very old and brittle. I made the two silicone molds

I chose the better looking of the two and made a small plaster master mold for it.

 This one fit in the bucket and made pouring very easy as I made a large access hole and a flat bottom

The small fish came out without many problems at all. I made about 12 of them. 3 of them broke while sanding them and breaking off the pouring spout but 9 survived, I sealed them with shellac and denatured alcohol and spray painted them. 8 of them were painted metallic black and chrome with a clear gloss finish and one was painted red and chrome with a clear gloss finish

 I drilled holes in the fish and added small eye hooks with epoxy  to hang them from. As I was hanging the fish from fishing line two of them fell and broke.The plaster was pretty soft and they both sustained tail breakage. It was just before we were to show them so I wasnt able to fix them.

Luckily there were still enough fish to get the point across and I was able to finish hanging them and present them. Overall they turned out ok. They spun in the wind which added a more lifelike quality to them.

I learned a lot from this project and I was able to do every step on my own from home. My next one will be a bit more complex now that I have a better grip on what I am doing.