'Lost cheese wax' and plaster play

 I suspect that Tathos would read the title of this blog and say "is that when you stick cheese wax up your arse?" so I will keep the title, in his honour, but assure you, dear reader, that it is not... Rather I'm just recording some experiments I did with mixing plaster and wax. In this case, inspired by 'lost wax' mould making, I was experimenting with encasing wax in plaster and then melting out the wax. The aim was to create interesting holes that couldn't be made by directly carving the wax. I think the results would be described by Tomgos as 'interesting' and by Tathos as 'fucking weird'. 

First I made a sort of hard-rock 'mine' with passages and steps:

Working in negative proved to be a bit a of head bender, and then removing the wax was also quite challenging. I tried a warm oven, but couldn't get the wax to melt before I lost my nerve because I thought the damp plaster might explode. I tried a hair dryer... nope. I tried a blow torch - lots of melting but only from the easy-to-reach bits, and the plaster started to go funny. Finally I got frustrated and shoved it in the oven after I had just used it to cook and, not only did the wax finally melt, but the plaster didn't explode. Happy days.

With wax gone, I discovered the main draw-back of the technique - the wax stains the plaster like a champ, giving everything a strange candy hue. I tried carving back to make the details cleaner, and remove some of the staining, but it's still very much a feature.

I like the view through the 'entrance' and the steps beyond, and maybe there could be ways to make the wax stain less (e.g. covering the exposed surfaces with something like PVA of Vaseline). Overall, however, I'd like to make these sort of objects (perhaps to sell, perhaps for fun) but I'll try a very different approach.

Somewhat deterred, but determined to find something useful, I tried a much flatter design with a sort of weird invertebrate model I made: 

Which turned out even weirder, and sort of cool in a way, but probably not very useful for anything. I tried removing the staining with sandpaper, but as you can see, the clear wax seems to soak even deeper and leaves a weird 'wet' mark.

Overall, I think this was fun, and definitely a technique to keep in my 'back pocket', but not useful at this time.