Mini city

So glad to be finally saying this but the minicity is COMPLETE!!
So the premise was to build a City in a bottle.  I had received a Ship in a Bottle kit from a good friend and after building the kit in one work-less night I thought "I wonder if you could do this, but with a city"  The way the ship "rose" in the bottle when the tieline was pulled was amazing, so i drew up some designs and started.

This is the base board.  As you can see it folds up into a nice tight package which could be then unfolded and laid flat in the "bottle".  I needed to get as much in the "bottle" as possible to build up a base.  I say "bottle" because I had a couple laying around and just used an average of their diameter for my target.  Not having a specific bottle in mind might have been my downfall...

The bottom of the base.  Just electrical tape as a hinge on matte board.  It worked very well.

This is the very beginning of the city layer.  The terrain was cut into three strips and electrical tape hinged together.  The first thing I built here was a stadium to be in the downtown area.

This is how the city layer folded, already it is showing to be very larger... much larger than the base layer when folded.

This is how the city layer would lay ontop of the base layer in the bottle.  I tried a couple of buildings on hinges and tied them together but the room needed to lay them down compromised the space that would be left when they rose.  I decided at this step to just glue the city layer permanently to the base layer.  A decision that I stand behind for this model, and one that will most certainly lead to creation of an actual "City in a Bottle" in my future. 

Work progressed to this stage...

To this one! finished model.

Assuming the average city block length is 0.075 miles (an average of NYC's 10 and 20 blocks per mile setup), the scale of this city is 1 to 9504. 

Me and my city

The first rule of fight club is...

This is my soap prop.

pretty much what my workstation consisted of all last year, my TRUNK

They got more and more accurate the more I did,  I know have 7, each with its own unique color.

Hammer test

This is a slip cast of the hammer mould.  I slipped it 3 times to build up the cast, still got some really thin spots and some air bubbles, especially in the claw part of the hammer.  This is a great example of using a slip cast to make me look super strong though

Hammer time

I'm going to try to say as little this time and let the pictures do the talking.
This is a hammer mould I made, same materials as the muffin.

The hammer was replaced and lots of release added.

Finally, many casts.  The far left is a solid pigmentable plastic which I did not pigment.  So it is translucent.  Some of these didn't turn out too well still because of air bubbles.  The yellow tint foam is a differnet weight than the white foam, but all are extremely light foam hammer casts.

Muffin

Ok this one was a lot of fun, mainly because of the high levels of spontaneity.  I went on a weekend trip with Kaitlin, my girlfriend, and we stayed a t ahotel that has a free breakfast service (lush... I know).  So I had gotten this blueberry muffin and decided to save it for the road and put it in my glove box as we drove back home, about a 4 hour drive for this vacation.

     Well about 2 weeks go by and I am driving to class one day and open the glove box for whatever reason and see the muffin still sitting there.  My first thought is "Daaaang, I have to throw that away", my second is "Wow this muffin has gotten really hard", and my third thought was "I could totally make a mould of this!"

     So I take the muffin back inside my house and begin to cast.  The first cast was of some left over plastic I had, then i did a series of Foam casts.  The foam I used was 10lb. and expanded about 10 times.  I decided to go with the foam because I had never used it before and had a lot of free time to screw it up and learn how to use it properly (the same reason I do most things).

Mixing up liquid plastic.

Plastic muffin cast.

I took a dinner break and made some amazing tacos that night and apparently took a photo.

Half painted muffin.

Glamour shot!

Then the foam casts.

Then finally both finished painted muffins

The Foam one is on the left, the Plastic one on the right.
thanks for dealing with this ridiculously long blog post!

Knife mould

This was my first major mould.  I get my materials from Askew Taylor in downtown Raleigh NC.  They have a great selection of almost anything ay artist would ever need.

The mould is a silicone rubber compound.  The sides of the mould are really rough because I didn't use enough mould release, so the silicone fused together and had to be ripped apart. 

These pieces of wood were used to hold the sides together and the clamps were used to clamp the wood together.  The mould was filled with a liquid plastic and allowed to harden for the appropriate amount of time.

The mould worked a lot better for just the handles.  As you can see the blades of the knives got a lot of air bubbles trapped in them from the design of the mould and the plastic proved so thin that it easily broke off.  Lesson learned, a harder plastic is needed to cast knife blades!

All the white is the cast and the black is the original.