Okay, so the project continues. The initial idea was that each tile would be a room or corridor and could be shifted around. Each entry point to a tile would be on the central two inches per side with walls around the rest. Obviously not all the entry points would be open, otherwise there'd be no point to the labyrinth!
So, I bought 8" square MDF bases from http://www.eastridingminiatures.co.uk/index.htm and a selection of Egyptian Molds from http://www.hirstarts.com/molds/moldsegypt.html (or I would have done if I didn't own them already).
Here's a shot of my casting area with casting in progress. The black molds are rock molds for another project, the turquoise ones are the Hirst Arts molds and the white ones are some custom molds I made to speed up casting.
The colour variation is due to me adding some clothes dye to the plaster to see if I could colour the casts. It works but increases setting time significantly. As a note of warning, I've also tried adding in acrylic and poster paint, these don't work! Not only is setting time drastically increased but the plaster doesn't mix properly making air bubbles virtually guaranteed and it also weakens the casts themselves. With my normal casts I can't break a standard block without tools, the casts with paint added, I could crush with some effort.
Another update shortly, I'm being sent to forage for food right now.
I have had some success adding concrete coloring to dental plaster. Drying time does increase slightly, but I have found that that is a good thing when pouring more than four molds at a time. I found a premixed bottle at the DIY store with the rest of the concrete and cement mix products. Very dense pigment load in a water soluble carrier, good stuff
ReplyDeleteWhat colour have you used? I read about cement colouring on the Hirst Arts forum but in my local DIY store it's only sold in large quantities. It's also only available in black and red.
ReplyDeleteI tried the brown clothes dye because it was cheap :) and it's pretty much pure pigment. Worked well, although as I said it did slow the setting time quite a bit. It worked better than it seems in the picture, the dark areas in the pic are patches of surface water that has collected after the molds were scraped.