MY PLASTER PULP EXPERIMENTS - HOLY CRAP I CRACKED IT!

SUCCESS SUCCESS SUCCESS

Okay just let me calm down a second...

Now for those who have been following my blog, especially my attempts at making a viable  plaster and pulp sculpting medium you will know of my semi successes and failures so far. Just the day before yesterday i posted on my latest failure. Okay yesterday i cracked the recipe..

I have created a plaster of Paris and tissue pulp medium that bonds to several mediums which paper mache artists currently mainly use. My plaster and pulp medium can be sculpted on or over existing creations and armatures without any prior preparations these being dry: plaster, clay, pulp, news paper, white printer paper, telephone directory paper, card stock and even wood.

My previous attempts at making this medium met with mixed results among which was a varying working time frame which ranged anything from eight minutes to fifteen minutes before the previous mediums dried out and became un-workable. Below is a short video of my latest and successful medium. Watch the video and see if you can guess the current life span of the medium in the video. Oh i apologise for the darkness of the video it was late, i was sore and tired. I did not think to check the lighting quality before shooting the video - Sorry.

 

 

So care to take a guess at how old this mix is then at the time of shooting this short video?

1: five minutes?

2: ten minutes?

3: fifteen minutes?

4: twenty minutes?

5: thirty minutes?

6: one hour?

Keep guessing.

keep guessing.

Keep guessing.

Keep guessing I will tell you in a minute.

Keep guessing.

Go on one more guess.

The medium you just watched me playing with in the short video is at the time of shooting the video was in fact two hours and eleven minutes old. Directly after shooting that video i made the following skull you can see below as well as testing it on the other mediums i mentioned above.

The skull in the foreground (on the right of the picture) is the one i made with my new plaster pulp medium. The skull in the background is a pure plaster skull i made days earlier. As you can see the new plaster pulp mix when dry can easily be carved/sculpted using a craft knife. It looks and feels just as strong as pure plaster and can easily be smoothed out to a very smooth finish no matter how you use it. Here it is direct from a latex mold however.

I did not use up all the plaster pulp mix in fact i wanted to know just how long it would stand before drying out and becoming too hard to work with. If you think two plus hours working time is unbelievable your not going to believe me then when i tell you that ten hours later the plaster pulp mix shown in the video was 'still' as fresh as that shown in the video. At that point i got tired of checking it every ten minutes and simply spread it out in the bowl and microwaved it for three minutes before going to bed.

So now there is one question still to answer. Can i remake this batch, if so will it work in the same way?

I will get to it in a few hours, run some tests then get back to you after the weekend on that one. Yes before anyone asks i WILL be giving you the recipe for this just as soon as i know if i can repeat the mixture and have the same results.

More soon