Hot Pour Vinyl Fishies

Materials:  Hot Pour Vinyl, Plaster, Vaseline, Acrylic Paints, Mold Box (wood or other), Modeling Clay
 
The mold for these herring was made for our production of 'The 39 Steps', by our clever and hilarious intern, Jess Smith, with guidance from yours truly.

Intern shown actual size.

 It is a simple two part plaster mold made from a fake fish that we had in stock.  See! Casting and faux foodstuffs in one convenient post!

The Original.

The first thing that Jess did was to determine where the seam of the mold wanted to be. With a symmetrical piece like a fish, this is a pretty easy task, especially when the fish you are using is a cast piece that already has a seam!  Using a wooden mold box, Jess built up clay around one side of the fish, taking up the space that one half of the mold would eventually fill.  Before applying a release agent, she built up clay near the mouth to form a pour spout, and carved a trough with a carving tool to act as a registration.  (A registration is made to keep the two pieces of the mold in the correct alignment.)  Once the clay dam was complete, Jess used petroleum jelly (good ol' Vaseline) to coat the clay dam, the wooden sides of the box, and the fish. This acted as a release agent so that the plaster would not stick to any of the surfaces and prevent the mold from being removed.  Jess then poured the plaster into the first side of the mold, and allowed it to cure.

Here you can see the first half of the mold and the clay dam that has been removed.

Once the plaster set, Jess removed the whole thing from the mold box (some disassembly required), flipped it, and settled in back into the mold box, plaster side down. She then removed the clay dam, built the second half of the pour spout, and gave the whole shebang another coat of petroleum jelly before pouring side two.  Once side two was poured, she removed the mold from the box, removed the fish from the mold, and gave both pieces of the mold a good scrubbing to remove the release agent.

See the registration trough/ridge?

The next step was to pour the castings.  We used pigmented hot pour vinyl to do this (see last weeks post here).  After securing the mold halves together, Jess heated the vinyl until it melted, and poured it into the mold.  The vinyl itself isn't sticky when it's dry, so no release agent was needed.  Then, once the vinyl had cooled, we popped it out of the mold, trimmed the sprue from the pour spout and painted the fishies silver with acrylic paint.  We did try to brush silver bronzing powder into the mold before casting, and while it looked good, the powder came off on our hands too easily when handling the herring- so we went with the paint instead.

The best thing about these fishies is their floppy quality.

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Something Brown made of Cabbage

Hello all! Thank you for being patient with me lately as the winter has stood in the way of my posting to this blog!  The blog has been getting quite a bit of action lately, so thank you to all who are spreading the word.  This week, I'd like to bring you something truly disgusting- and I hope you'll enjoy it!

Last season we put on a production called "The Government Inspector."  It's a pseudo-period piece that takes place in Czarist Russia.  We find our protagonist at the inn. He has spent all of his money, and is begging the innkeepers wife to allow him to charge one more meal to his account.  She offers him a variety of dreadful things (including cabbage pie and 'something brown made of cabbage' ) from which he chooses a bowl of soup.  Only the bowl of cabbage soup (with chicken feathers) is eaten on stage, but the rest of the menu is pulled out for display.

The soup was a bowl of chicken broth containing a preset feather, but the cabbage pie and something brown were up to me. 

Mmmmm. Delicious. Who wouldn't want to eat that?

 For the cabbage pie, I started with some hot pour vinyl that I found in our kitchen. Our previous craftsperson had made up a batch of the vinyl with sawdust mixed into it, and I liked the texture.  I re-melted the vinyl and poured it out onto a cookie sheet. Once it was cool, I used scissors to cut it into thin strips, like sauerkraut.  I made the crust from Great Stuff. I like to use it as pastry sometimes because it has interesting texture, and is strong and lightweight. I made a blob of it on a sheet of plastic, and cut it to shape when it was dry.  Before painting it, I gave it a coat of white glue so that the paint would stick 

As you can see from the photo, the pie is sewn together. I still have not found an adhesive that works with hot pour vinyl, especially when it is in such small pieces The stitches were not apparent onstage, and allowed the towering pie slice a bit of wiggle.

The 'something brown' was made with hot pour vinyl also, but I wanted it to have a different base.  Under this pile of vinyl sauerkraut and sauce, there are several patties made from baked salt dough and spray painted with Glossy Wood Tone.  The result is a delightful "ewww" from most people who see it.  The hot pour vinyl really gives it the oily sheen that terribly greasy food needs, and the different tones and textures seem to remind people of the worst casserole of their lives.  Mission accomplished!

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