I Can Now Make an Army

So today I visited the sculpting area at ECUAD to meet with David Morgan, whom I have been consulting about puppet making for my project. David directed me to Camrose Ducote, another incredible technician who showed me how to operate the Vacuum Form Machine.

Here how it went...

He's on the plate.

 

Here's the Polyethylene sheet.

The plastic being heated up.

The heated plastic got vacuumed with the model.

The model got pulled out.

And it's a failure...

What went wrong was that the space between the model and the plate was too little, so the plastic wasn't properly pulled down. Another problem was the design of the puppet itself as it has what's call an undercut, meaning he's doesn't have a flat back, and this created a tear when the plastic is being pulled down as it became too thin in the said area. And the puppet was kind of destroyed, the air dried clay was too crumbly, next time if I ever going to cast a mold again I probably would create my object or character with sculpy.

But it was the first try, we tried again.

And it's a success! 99% I'll say. By using a bigger sheet of plastic there was much more room for stretching that it got pulled down nicely. Though I said it's 99% because the plastic still got punctured during the vacuum process and so the fine details between the finger ans the feet of the model didn't really get folded between. But it's a satisfactory mold in which I can now make numerous casting of the puppet in various materials. Cheers.