Covering materials experiment

It is clear that in order to mold my Styrofoam blank, I'm going to have to coat it with something to make it smoother. I've got a whole bunch of ideas, so I decided to simply experiment and see what works best.

I cut these shapes out of the leftover Styrofoam I have. They should fairly well represent the kind of complex shapes that are on the blank


My first experiment involved different ways of applying plaster


I also will attempt to cover with tempera paint, wax, and paper mache


Here are the results


Smearing plaster on with my finger worked fairly well, but did not fully cover the styrofoam


Applying plaster with a knive left uneven surfaces


I was going to attempt to paper mache with plaster, but the plaster set too quickly, so I tried to smear setting plaster with my finger, unfortunately I don't think that plaster is going to work because of the speed with which it dries.


Paper mache can't handle the complex curves


Tempera paint covered everything well, but maintained the texture of the Styrofoam


I think we have a winner. I painted candle wax from tea lights with a paintbrush. The result is a fairly smooth and uniform finish conforming to the contours of the Styrofoam without adding much bulk. An added plus is when molding I don't think the plaster will adhere to wax.


Dripping candle wax over the part didn't work as well as painting. I didn't give me much control over the application and created uneven surfaces and artifacts.


Since I had left over glue from the paper mache experiment, I covered the Styrofoam in watered down white Elmer's type glue. It didn't achieve the results I desire.


So it looks like I will be hand brushing melted tea light wax onto the Styrofoam blank. This has all the advantages: Cheap, easy to apply, easy to cleanup, workable after application, and should be resistant to adhesion with plaster during the mold making process.

Total: 69 h