For the casting assignment, my approach was to try as many things as possible until something worked. The things I made have varying degrees of completeness, accuracy, and realism. First, like everyone else, I had several plaster casts from alginate molds. These were the bases for most of the things I tried and invariably were destroyed as I tried to go on. I found it pretty challenging to orient my hand in such a way that I could later isolate my ring finger but by the fifth time I eventually got it.

I also tried molding my hand in a flat basin of alginate and molding my fist directly in plaster. Both of those failed abysmally though with some practice the flat cast in alginate could work. Also, at one point there was some extra plaster sitting on the table from someone or another so George and I tried molding some of my extra fingers of plaster in plaster. It did not work. I later went on to coat plaster in the easy-removal wax when I made negatives from it.

I also took one of the plaster fingers and molded it using the paint-on silicon. It took two coats so I have yet to try making a positive from that negative.

I tried using the vitaflex 300 to make a negative from some plaster fingers. It went poorly.

A negative of silicon seems to have gone better but I didn’t mix it quite well enough so it took an extremely long time to set and I have yet to try to make a positive from it.

Finally, I made some positives directly in the alginate using both the dragonskin and the silicon. The silicon was with some extra in an imperfect index finger mold so it isn’t great. The dragonskin came out very well and has a realistic consistency but the mold was curved so one of the dividers I used to save the dragonskin created a notch in the side of the finger.