Going to Denmark BRB

I just got an offer to come back and work for 10tons in Copenhagen like NOW. Sure.

I found a room in Malmö (still in Sweden, but right next to Denmark) surprisingly fast so on Saturday I'll be getting on a 16-hour train to the south.

I'll be working on an assortment of animal heads for the Australian contribute to Eurovision (wat? I don't know), an "Oak leaf leather furniture project", a huge leather trilobite and assembling a whale skeleton.

This is going to be great.

This time in Denmark I'm not going to be financially handicapped like last time, I'll have sufficient funds to actually enjoy myself and maybe aquire some exotic materials.

Also, it's probably already summer over there, so I can skip the confused slushy gravel season we have up here and come back in time for the actual spring.

Perfect.

It is a lovely place 

There's the workshop, or a part of I it, outside there's a huge room complete with industrial machines for large scale projects and repairing boats. 

All the materials, tools, machines and space needed to make Anything.

This will solve my problems with the lotus, I'll just bring it over to Denmark (along with the dragon parts) and with access to some fancy machinery I can make perfect casts.

My favourite thing about this place is the abundance of disposable things.

Prop-maker pornography

Look at this, that's an entire box of assorted mixing containers and endless stacks of clean buckets. 

After two years in the prop-making program workshop, in which you were lucky if you could find a discarded take away coffee cup in the dumpster that could be made somewhat presentable, this is amazing and luxurious to me.

Anyway, now I'll enjoy a few hectic days of putting everything in order for the trip.

Dragon casting

Making some more dragon parts!

I've made the molds and I'm just now waiting for the first batch of those claws, spikes and horns (in the first picture) to cure.
Waiting for stuff to cure is both really exciting and brings great angst. It might turn out great and that makes you really happy, or the cast comes out completely useless because [stuff] happened and you've now wasted time, materials and money and for a while you feel like maybe the best cause of action is to apply for a job at McDonalds instead.

Anyway, the head and rib-cage cast turned out great

I made slush casts (you slush a small amount of the resin around in the mold until it sets along the walls, instead of filling it completely) to get hollow casts and sanded out the spaces in between ribs and teeth from the inside.

I've only got a few vertebrae left to sculpt and then I can start assembling the bones.


Super-cool frozen glowing Black Lotus progress:










The lotus petal casts turned out like crap. Again, and again and again.
The resin somehow reacts with the mold, forming a layer of bubbles along the surface of the mold in an otherwise bubble free resin.
This kind of silicone should be compatible with the poly-optic, might be that the mold is somehow tainted.
Anyway, after experimenting with a thousand different fixes trying to get a good cast I accept defeat temporarily, and decided to just sand down the failed casts and re-"sculpt" the surface with a dremel.

Anyway, I'm going to paint the petals on the outside of these, stack them and cast them into more poly-optic.
When emerged in the resin they will be crystal clear (well, they are, but the sanded surface makes them appear cloudy) and disappear - leaving only the painted petals visible

It's gonna be great, probably.

Wooloowloowloo

Just a small needle felted wool owl I just made for an Etsy-customer.

Basic shaping and feet

The feet and toes are made from iron wire, fully posable so the owl can perch on pretty much
anything.
The claws and beak are made from Green Stuff, sanded and painted later on.
The eyes are glass, pre bought.

The wool I'm using is locally produced, I had to venture deep into the northern wilderness to get it from an old hermity wool lady.
It's a peculiar place, she just sits there in the middle of nowhere preparing copious amounts of wool.
Her house consists of wool, wool, wool, wool, wool, a huge monster of a carding machine and... a disco room.

One could argue that there are easier ways to get wool, but it's really nice wool.

The moss underneath is a tray. I like keeping my smaller craft projects on trays so I can easily switch between active projects and move them back and forth.
I care deeply for the moss tray and only use it for friendly and pleasant things.
The other trays are for angry projects with knives, sticky clays, solvents and chemicals.

Adding details

Aaand finished!

Also, unrelated to the owl:

a sneak peek of something completely different, something secret.

It's not the larch.

New old, dead dragon

Many years ago I made a ceramic dragon skeleton as a project in art school, I've always wanted to do a remake because think some of the parts are crudely sculpted and I can make it a lot better now.

I never really found the time to do so until now, when I got a custom order for another one.

Instead of ceramic, which is brittle and has to be fired, I will make the new one from polyurethane plastic, two-component self curing clay and some real chicken bones.

I wont make all the parts separately as with the ceramic one, instead it will be sculpted in bigger, mouldable sections.

Some of the bigger parts almost ready for moulding.

Although it will be better than the last, I won't have time to make this one as super realistic as I'd like.

I'll just wait for an opportunity for another remake. A bigger, better one.

Apart from the dragon I'm working on two other projects, an award statue for the Nordic championship in Magic - The gathering for Nordsken (local computer-/boardgame festival): A glowing Black Lotus frozen in a block of "ice".

Some petals for the Black Lotus being moulded

The third project is a secret I'm not allowed to publish yet.

Mildly frustrating.

The Oscars, fin-making and a special delivery

This is the start of a little project for my own amusement, an Oscars Statue. 

It's funny because this species of fish, Astronotus Ocellatus, is commonly known as an "Oscar".

Preparing for the Oscars

Some fins for a Barreleye fish (a little side-project) at 10tons

The fish also has that incredibly convenient black and gold coloration, similar to a regular Oscars statue.

The finished Oscar will be partly covered in real leaf gold, in my mind it looks amazing.

I'm using chavant clay for the fleshy parts of the fish, but I'll have to use a different material for the fins. 

I learned this really nifty fin-making technique at 10tons where you make the fin rays from greenstuff, press them halfway into a slab of kneading silicone and brush on a few layers of Split-Fin Repair (I love the fact that this product even exist, it's developed for taxidermy applications) to create the skin in between. When dry the fin can be removed, moulded and cast in polyoptic, and you get a thin, transparent fin.

I also received a bunch of materials today.

My lovely mother brough the family together to donate some cashmonies so I could buy a sort of basic starting-up-the-business-kit with various clays, silicones and casting materials, so I wouldn't be hampered by a lack of crucial but expensive materials.

<3

I don't know what I expected, I know cabosil (filler-material for silicones) is very light-weight but I still imagined 500g would come in a smallish bag.
Didn't expect a humongous 20 litre bucket. It feels like it contains a mix of air and nothing, but it is filled to the brim with what looks and feels like powdered aerogel.
Fascinating material.

The retroactive Denmark Superpost

As a part of  the Propmaking-programme I went to Copenhagen for an internship at 10tons (a company specialized in making zoologic models and paleontological reconstructions) for three months.The notion of living in Denmark did excite me (as most Swedes I don't really like Denmark because they don't have any cheese cutters), but 10tons did.

A propmaking company that makes fish, squid and scaly things is perfect, those are my favourite things to make. 

The Denmark Aquarium

As stated above I really like fish and sea creatures so I was looking forward to visiting the Denmark Aquarium again, but it turns out that the aquarium had shut down and was moving to a huge new facility.

The new Denmark Aquarium (Den Bla Planet) was to open on the same day as my flight back home.

I accepted defeat and was rather disgruntled.

But it turns out 10tons had made a bunch of models for the aquarium and we went there two times before the opening to install the exhibition, and later to an early premiere.

Some of 10tons creations at Den Bla Planet

The Great White Shark hanging from the ceiling is life-sized and is made from 3D-scanning a small model and getting the full scale version CNC-milled in styrofoam before applying the hard surface, details and paintwork.

Reef in construction and a very friendly octopus

A tunnel leading through the big reef

The leather seals

We spent the first few days covering a styrofoam seal with fiberglass mesh, jesmonite and foam sheets, preparing it to be covered in leather as part of a leatherworking course held at the company by Mark Beabey.

The seals were made for a seal exhibition at Fimus fishing & seafare-museum, as sort of interactive climbing things for children.

One of the finished seals and a huge leather crab, By Esben Horn and Mark Beabey, pictures from 10tons website

The project

The best thing about this internship was that instead of spending three months performing the kind of boring, simple tasks that interns usually get, I was asked to start a project of my own choice.

My original plan was to make a coelacanth but realised I should probably use the opportunity to try out clear casting.

I eventually settled on a translucent deep sea squid.

Sculpting the squid

I started by sculpting two kinds of tentacles with water clay and cast them in polyurethane plastic instead of sculpting them all individually, and integrated the castings into the body-sculpture.

The tentacles are spread out to make the moulding easier, when the finished cast is cured the tentacles can be heat-bent into a different shape.

Before starting the moulding process I covered the sculpture in clear varnish and a few layers of a schellack- and ink-mixture to even out small imperfections and give it a smooth and shiny surface.

The mould

I covered the squid in three layers of diluted spray-on silicone, three layers of regular silicone, and three layers of thickened silicone. The keys along the edges are to lock the silicone into the jesmonite and fiberglass shell. 

The mould is essentially like a bag that opens at the big flat side, allowing the resin to be poured in.

The squid within or... the Squidin.

I wanted the squids body to be layered, so before making the final cast I had to make a new "inner mould", so I took a plastic cast from the big mould and sanded it down about a centimeter on all sides and made a new mould from that.

The picture on the right is the inner layer cast in CrystalClear with some wool to immitate organic tissue and cryptolyte (gives the material a faint blueish sheen in daylight and glows in UV-light). 

The intestines are haphazardly sculpted (they wont show that much anyway) from water clay and cast in polyoptic.

The eyes

I made two moulds for the eyes, from a water clay sculpture, one with the inner shape of the actual eye and one with a lens.

I vacuformed clear shells over a plastic cast from the inner mould, airbrushed the inside of the shells with mirror ink, popped them back onto the plastic "body" and added the colour and spots on the outside.

I then used the other mould to cast a polyoptic lens onto the eyes.

The final cast

I didn't have time for this to go wrong so to ensure a perfect, bubble-free casting I diluted the polyoptic resin with acetone to lower viscosity, degassed the mixture in the mould in a vacuum-chamber and, just in case, let the casting cure under high pressure.

Painting and finish

I didn't want to paint the spots, because it's hard to make it not look "painted" on a transparent material, so I tried adding tiny spots of thin, dyed paper to the surface.
And this is as far as I got before I had to leave, I did however bring it home (it made the x-ray guys day at the airport) to complete it.

When I got home and got my normal brain back, after the Denmark-brain had convinced me the spots looked fine because there wasn't enough time to change the spotting technique before I had to leave, I realised that this looks like crap, so I promptly sanded the spots off again.

At home I've been trying out masking the squid with a layer of latex, leaving the spots to be airbrushed. And it worked out great, except the paint didn't adhere to the material properly.
I'll be trying it again when I find the time (masking just one side like this took a full day, latex is bothersome to work with), this time using plastic primer and the proper paint.

The squid masked with latex in various colours

Working with the squid was my main project during my time at 10tons, but of course I performed various regular intern-tasks as well. I did my fair share of sanding, gluing, mixing stuff, assembling tiny sharks and bending tentacles.
And I got to try out what felt like thousands of new cool materials, casting techniques and machines.
I probably learned more in those three months than during my two years at the prop-making programme.
I was asked to come back and work at 10tons when they need more workforce and will hopefully be going there again soon.


TL;DR: Went to denmark, made a squid, learned a lot.