 | 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. |
Some sort of two part mold would seem to be the answer, one for the teeth and the other for the gums. My first thought was to cut the teeth out of a resin jawset with my Dremel, insert them back into the original mold, and make a model of just the gums from which to make a second mold. Below, getting ready to pour silicone for the model.
  | 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.) |   |
Below, pink resin gums cast from these new molds, with teeth inserted temporarily. Looks pretty good but....
Damn. The round thing in the middle is leftover resin that cured in the mixing cup. See how nice and smooth it is? See how full of bubbles the gums are? There's lots and lots of things that cause bubbles in castings but here it's due to replicative failure. Each time I demold rubber from rubber, microscopic layers peel away from the surface, creating these bubbles in the mold. (Even if I'm using plenty of release. Which can also cause bubbles, damn!!) Three times I poured rubber into rubber to make these, adding more bubbles with every step.
What to do next? Maybe at some point in the future I could investigate stronger rubber, but in the meantime, maybe I should go back to making molds from original sculpts whenever possible.
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