I was not excited about this week’s assignment, to say the least. I don’t know a lot about making molds and casts, and Dr. Wettergreen made it very clear that the materials used for such processes were very expensive, and I wasn’t excited about wasting a lot of material while trying to figure out what to do. I also wasn’t looking forward to making plaster casts of random body parts, especially disembodied fingers.

I took a sculpture class in high school, and we did have an assignment to use plaster strips to make molds of random body parts and make art with them. However, that being an art class, things got a little wild. We cast feet, hands, faces, etc. I remember struggling to wrap the plaster around my friend’s toes. I remember having to literally cut the cast off of my arm because it was so tight it wouldn’t come off. I remember my friend trying to figure out how to breathe while the plaster was over her mouth.

And then we worked on the final casts to try to make their weird plaster body parts into masterpieces, but we primarily succeeded in making them into weirder plaster body parts. The girl next to me decided to paint her hand flesh-colored, which quickly dove too deep into the Marianas Trench equivalent of the uncanny valley. Another girl glued broken mirrors to her back. A third girl painted her hand green and glued fake plants to it. And throughout the whole thing, when we weren’t working on our pieces, they were stored on the rack in a manner not unlike a dystopian body farm. My best friend said it reminded her of that Doctor Who episode “The Almost People” and I don’t necessarily disagree with her.

So flash forward a couple of years later, and I get a similar assignment in ENGI 210. So you can imagine my hesitation to work on this project. It was also a really busy week for me, so I didn’t actually start the project until Friday afternoon. I knew that decision would probably bite me in the butt, but I also hadn’t had time to work on it earlier so…

I insisted that I not start this process alone because I was still too unsure of how to actually make a mold and didn’t want to waste materials. Conveniently, Christina was at the OEDK and Josh was on shift and I needed to learn how to do shape transfer anyway, so I picked Josh’s brain for some advice because he had already done the majority of the project. This proved insanely helpful and massively cut down on the trial and error I had to do and saved me a ton of time and resources. (Something something ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’?)

We started by measuring out 2 ounces of alginate by weight into a plastic measuring cup and 8 fluid ounces of water into different measuring cup to get a solid 1:4 ratio to make the mold itself. Josh told us that the plastic solo cups were the perfect size to hold that amount of material, and that amount of material was a good size for casting multiple fingers at once.

We then began to mix the alginate with the water. After observing some trial and error in class the week before, we knew the major pitfalls to avoid when mixing the mold. We started by pouring the water into the cup and slowly sifting the powder into the cup while stirring it with the drill, as we learned was effective in class.

And then the drill’s battery died half way through this process.

So I tell Christina to go downstairs and grab a new battery while I switch to trying to mix up the mold with a whisk that was lying on the table. Except the whisk is about the same size as the cup and I am really really bad at beating eggs by hand via whisk because I don’t even like eggs, so although I was technically able to somewhat successfully mix the alginate together, there were still definitely pockets of powder and water where it wasn’t mixed properly.

And then we weren’t sure quite how long I had until the mix would change color and I had to put my finger in to form the mold. So I kept mixing the powder and noticed it was white a little two late and frantically stuck my hand in to let it finishing hardening around it. On the bright side, the texture of the mold wasn’t nearly so gross as it looked. On the downside, I knew while the mold was hardening that it wouldn’t make a very good cast because I definitely had some wiggle room.

After I let the alginate harden, I mixed up the EasyFlo as per Josh’s instructions. We mixed half a shot glass of Part A with half a shot glass of Part B in a measuring cup to get the necessary 1:1 ratio and mixed it together with a spoon before pouring it into the mold. Using the shot glass as a measuring device actually made like the perfect amount of EasyFlo to fill a fingermold or two, and using the measuring cup made it a lot easier to pull the hardened material out after it dried.

I remembered to put my screws into the cast so it can hang from a wall and waited around while it took a suspiciously long time to solidify.

But eventually, the white dots in the EasyFlo expanded and solidified to form a cast.

I waited for it to solidify for another half an hour (during which I spent time learning how to use the vinyl cutter) and came back to reveal my cast!

Wow. It looked terrible. Like, I knew it would be a bad cast, but that takes the cake. For so many reasons. It’s uneven, filled with holes, covered in lumpy bits that I guess are holes in the mold, and looks far more sexual than any finger has any right to. It basically looks like some sculptor tried to make a finger out of wet mud… in other words, nothing like the perfect likeness I should have gotten.

So I went back that night, and this time, I was prepared.

I laid newspaper down on the table so it wouldn’t get covered in plaster and alginate. I remembered to coat my hands in wax so I could get them back out again. I had an extra drill battery. I had my VR homework to watch while I was waiting for everything to dry. I was experienced, I was prepared, and I was ready.

I measured out the powder and water to make the mold and mixed up the alginate. I then mixed it up using the drill (which thankfully didn’t die this time), and satisfyingly watched as it became smooth and creamy and turned colors from pepto-bismol pink to light bubblegum pink to finally white. This looked and felt a lot more right than my previous attempt. (That being said, I did get splatters of alginate all over my pants, but that’s okay because it dissolves in water.) As I noticed the mix start to turn white, I stuck in three fingers into the cup so I could get multiple casts out of this mold instead of one at a time. I didn’t get the pinky, and teh pointer finger rubbed up too much against the edge of the cup to be useful, but I could tell that the middle two fingers would produce a much more elegant cast.

I could kind of feel the mold hardening around my fingers, but I decided to wait over ten minutes just to make sure (especially because the bag says that the material takes ~10 minutes to harden). When the mold was ready, I pulled out my hand, mixed up the EasyFlo like the master bartender / egg-maker that I am not, and poured it into my mold. I actually didn’t have enough material to fill the mold for the third finger, but like I said, I didn’t think it would turn out that well anyway because my fingers rubbed against the side of the cup too much while I was making the mold.

While I waited, I continued watching my video and learned all about Virtual Reality as it relates to a sense of identity, a complete invasion of privacy, and the forefront of the AR-ridden future that is absolutely coming. It was actually a really interesting video, if you want to watch it.

So a half hour passes, and it was time to unveil my cast. Because there were two fingers at more of an angle within the plaster, this one proved a lot more difficult to remove. I tried carefully jimmying it out, but it wouldn’t give and started tearing at the alginate. By that point, the mold was a lost cause, so I gave up on trying to preserve it and started tearing it to get at the cast inside. As I pulled the cast out of the mold, I had to specifically pull out the pieces that were still stuck to the cast because they weren’t coming off otherwise. So I had a beautiful cast, complete with indents showing veins and wrinkles and fingerprints, but at what cost?

At that point, I wasn’t sure if we needed two of the exact same cast (as per our usual assignments) or only one finger (as per the rubric) or what to complete this assignment… meaning I didn’t know if I had to start over or could move on with post-processing these casts. So I did neither of those two things and went to bed instead.

I woke up to a conversation between Dr. Wettergreen and Kelly regarding the same topic. When she asked him whether we needed two of the same finger, he only gave the cryptic response, “Optimally same finger but don’t stress.” This could have multiple connotations, but I took it at face value: I had two casts of the same finger and it wasn’t going to be easy for me to get two of the exact same casts, so I decided not to stress and move on with my life: It was time to post-process!

I started by breaking apart the two fingers because they had been cast together. This was surprisingly easy, considering I had been afraid the body of the fingers would break upon impact.

So now I had two separate pieces, but the edges were rough from being forced apart. I ran into Nick Escobar and asked him what he did to post-process his pieces. He told me that he used a dremel to sand down the edges of the piece and make it a lot smoother. And that did work at taking off large but precise amounts of plaster. It also produced a ton of plaster dust that blew right into my eyes.

I was already wearing safety glasses on top of my regular glasses, but that simply wasn’t cutting it because I was being mercilessly attacked by plaster particles. So I shamelessly used my lab tech access to run into the machine shop and grab a plastic facemask from the wirebrush grinding stations. This is definitely not the purpose of those facemasks (and according to Nick, definitely overkill), but it also worked really well at letting me be able to dremel away the plaster bits without while being able to see exactly what I was doing.

Once I had dremelled down the imperfections and smoothed the pieces over with sandpaper, I had to decide what else to do with them. I had been playing around with the idea of painting my nails but was afraid it would look kind of tacky. But then I decided that the cast of the fingernails wasn’t very smooth and I wanted to try to cover that up. So because I was too lazy to go back to Martel and grab actual nail polish, I grabbed the paint I had bought (but never used) for the midterm project and mixed up some nail polish.

I did test it on the bad cast first and decided that it looked decent enough on a bad cast that it would probably look fairly good on a cast of actual quality. The nail polish also succeeded in making it look more like, well, a finger. So I painted the nails of my two casts and realized that A) This does not look better on a cast of actual quality, B) This actually emphasizes all the imperfections on the fingernail instead of hiding them, and C) oh yeah, I actually suck at painting nails. In real life, I can scrub all the excess nail polish off my skin in the shower. On this project, I was stuck with paint on plaster and the whole world knowing that I have no future whatsoever working at a nail salon.

So I decided to abort mission and try to repaint with fingers white and be done with it. So I started by attempting to wipe off the paint. Obviously, that made my problem worse.

I then painted back over the fingers with white paint. I painted a couple of coats, but they kept ending up turning pink from the red paint under them. I decided I didn’t want to trust a heat gun to dry the paint, so I decided to grab a Popsicle from the freezer (because lord knows I deserve it) after last week and wait for my fingers to air dry.

After I let my fingers air dry a bit, I tried to paint another coat of white paint on the finger, but again, it turned pink. Anna suggested that I just embrace the pink and paint the entire thing a faint pink fleshy color, which I rejected for obvious reasons. It did, however, give me the idea to just paint a pink gradient on the finger. It emphasizes the pink without making it look super creepy Except it does kind of look like blood. On hands.

Which makes one think of a certain Shakespeare play…

 

I don’t even like Shakespeare. But. Blood. Hands. Macbeth. It’s intentional. We’re going with it. *Waves jazz hands* ART!