When casting in plaster especially in ordinary plaster you HAVE to remember to make the thickness of the plaster molding a little thicker than you normaly require around the subject to be cast.
Take my Troll Screamers for instance. Great fun to make & you would think extremely simple because of their size. Yet the hands & feet by the very nature of the shapes of them they can be a little time consuming to do, especially if you need two or three pairs at a time. With time in mind i decided to cast a set of hands & feet in plaster rather than the normal foil copying method i use for the body, legs, faces etc. Whilst i need to make two complete feet (left & right) both upper & lower foot seperately for each single foot. The hands can simply be flipped over after being cast from a single hand casting (two halves of one hand).
Unfortunately for me on one side of the hand i didn't add enough plaster to the mold & the result was a thinner half mold section than was viable to use. By that i mean when i opened the mold the thin section snapped in half!. All is not always lost though as you can see below:
The PVA glue i use has many uses everything from basic glue to wall (dry wall) plaster sealer before painting to reduce plaster cracking etc, wood glue & much more. Mercifully the snap in my plaster casting was a very clean crisp edged snap. So using undilluted PVA glue i bonded the two halves together then wrapped & glued a cardstock case/support around it. To add even more strength to the repaired casting i then ran a strip of the thinnest paper i had over the join (telephone book paper) then sealed the whole surface in again undilluted PVA glue.
Whilst it now looks ugly & unproffessional it WILL work perfectly allowing me to create many many dozens of pairs of Troll Screamer hands before i have to go & make a complete new set of castings as i would at 'some pont' in the future anyway.
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