I don't remember what inspired me to make the upper half of a jawset out of blue silicone rubber, nor what inspired me to use it as a window cling in the dining room. However seeing it hanging there gave me a new idea to try for a two part mold. So here goes!

​Here goes nothing! The white resin is poured into the mold. (The mold on the left hand side is for claws.)

​The blue mold piece is removed, leaving the white teeth in the translucent mold piece.

Pouring the pink resin into the mold. It overflowed a little to one side, not a big deal as it can be trimmed off after it sets up.

So I was unenamoured with airbrushing, at least when it came to painting jawsets, and I decided to attempt to cast them in two different colors of resin. The saints at the Smooth On tech support department recommended I pour one color of resin over the other before it had a chance to set up fully.To the left, the result. Um, no.

Removing the cured rubber from the mold, with the teeth still attached. It would appear I have my model from which to make a mold for the gums. (The fabric was added while the rubber was curing, so that I'd have something to glue the models down to the mold board with afterwards. It wouldn't work so well to just glue the silicone to the mold board, as cured silicone doesn't stick to much of anything.)

Here goes nothing! Pouring the silicone over the models for the new gum mold. (The snaky thing on the far right is an attempt at a lip.)

Ah, trying to airbrush jawsets with white teeth and pink gums. Much easier said than done. First, the paint has to stick. Second, it has to go where you want it and not where you don't.


If there is even a trace of release on the cast forget it, the paint will not stick. The good news is, resin cast into silicone rubber doesn't really need release! Yay! Unfortunately the paint doesn't like to stick to bare resin either, and according to the saints at Smooth On Technical Support there are very few primers that will help. One is the Bulldog Adhesion Promoter shown here. The other is Plasticote Sandable Primer Enamel.


The areas where paint is not wanted need to be masked. What to use? Liquid frisket came first to mind, here applied with silicone shaper tools. (The frisket would quickly ruin a regular paintbrush.) For me, this was very tricky and took several hours to apply. I only attempted masking the teeth with the frisket, as I was completely daunted by the much larger surface area of the gums.

.

I hit the airbrush forums looking for a mask less fiddly than frisket, and found.... Poster Putty.

Not bad, but not great either. The putty more or less worked, but the gumline was messy, and I'd like to avoid this much touching up with a paintbrush if at all possible.

And back to the message boards. Another recommended masking material- SIlly Putty!!

It kinda worked, but....

The paint built up around the edges of the putty and left these unattractive ridges along the gumline, which no amount of touching up with a paintbrush is going to fix! The message boards warned of this.