Weekend Castings & Carvings

Busy weekend on the scale modeling front. I've continued to experiment with casted plaster of paris as a carvable medium for making things in scale. Ok so maybe my blocks are a bit out of scale for 1:48, but oh well. You get the idea. I messed up on painting it and you can see a small brick towards the bottom left that is overly bright. I'm planning on sticking a poster over that area and no one will ever know!






Here's a bit more on how these are made....

1. Plaster of Paris is cast by using an upside down Tupperware box as a mold (no kidding).
2. After at least 12-15 hours of curing (24+ is better, dryer) the cast is removed from the box.
3. Using an X-acto knife it's cut into usable square shapes.
4. This is where the carving begins. For now I've found a basic awl (no idea where I bought it) which is my preferred tool. In the sample below I've begun making the block wall. I used a ruler to make the horizontal lines, and then I'm just free-handing the vertical lines:
   
   
5. So carving is now done, but there's one problem. There are a number of holes from air bubbles resulting from the casted plaster (I don't have a plaster vacuum like pro setups would have, so I have to deal with bubbles).
   
   
6. As much as is possible, I used the side of the awl to sort of "scrape out" the bubble if it isn't too deep. This has the added benefit of adding texture to the Z-axis. (Not sure how visible it is in this picture)
   
   
7. We're ready for painting. There's typically 2 things I do to paint it: (1) base washes, and (2) dry brushing.
   
   A wash is acrylic paint diluted with water, about maybe 10:1 - 15:1 or so. I laugh at the paints that I'm using. These are 89 cent craft store specials, but it doesn't matter because they just get watered down anyways.
   
   Here you can see I'm making a wash out of blueish gray + raw sienna:
   
8. With washes it's always good to test on a piece of scrap first, just in case....
   
9. So after it's been washed over, it starts developing an uneven (aka organic) look. The wash also does well to fill in all the cracks so that when viewed under light (with a shadow) they start looking darker. I learned this on my first attempt -- don't make the shadows dark. Light will do the rest, and straight-black cracks will destroy any 3D appearance that the unit has.
   
   
10. The second part of painting is dry brushing. In dry brushing, you get some paint on the brush, and then wipe it off. (yeah you read that right) It leaves next-to-no paint on the brush, which is exactly what you want. Then you lightly paint the unit. It tends to only leave a touch of paint that highlights texture (which is ideally what we're looking for).
    
11. Here you can see I've started dry brushing with Burnt Umber. It seems a bit much in places, but it's OK because I'll be dry brushing white over everything in a few minutes to mellow it all out (and also provide some desaturation)
    
12. And then somehow after all that fuss we end up with ye olde final product....
    
    

Looking at these pictures now I think I have too much white drybrushed on there. No problem, I'll just dry brush some burnt umber or black over it to mellow it out (that's the great thing about dry brushing, it's always workable).

When done the unit is sealed with a matte or dull coat.

Tada!