A Casting too Far

So John and I tried to make a fairly ambitious cast for our first real attempt at using a latex reinforced gypsum known as duoMatrix NEO.  This casting material was supposed to be very strong and light weight, so that we could make larger and thinner castings.  As you can see, it was a bit of a disaster, with body parts shattered and strewn across our work area above.  So where did we go wrong?

• We tried to go too big on our first cast with a new material.  Without enough time to really learn the working properties of duoMatrix, we had no reference point upon which to base the amount of material and the reinforcement required to make a cast of this size work.
• We started late and were very tired.  The size of the mold, the complexity of the preparation of a new material, and our addled brains were not the right mix.
• We also decided to experiment in this same session with yet another casting material unknown to us: wax.  We had a pretty poor setup for melting the wax, and little guidance on how to pour successfully.  As a result our wax cooled too quickly and pooled in the breasts.  In the end, adding wax to our list of things to do only made us work even later, which led to even more mistakes.  But a partially successful cast in wax did emerge from the process.  Because we can easily "edit" wax positives, it would be a nice material to master.  Since alginate molds inevitably have errors, wax would give us the opportunity to make corrections before making a more permanent mold for future casting.

• And lastly, we did not have proper plaster bandages for the mother mold, so we had to create this hulking mess below from plaster and burlap.  While not pretty, it did do the job.  The problem was that in demolding it was so rigid and difficult to manipulate, that our already weak casting did not withstand the pressures of the removal process.  Perhaps a bit more care might have have left more of the body cast intact, but it was never likely that we were going to emerge from this process with any great success other than lessons well learned.