This week assignment was to design a 3D mold, machine it and cast it.

I have an obsessive fascination on representation of imaginary human beings. I have drawn them, painted them, made sculptures out of solder, and recently drawn them digitaly:

So I thought this week’s assignment could be a good opportunity to create a digitally generated human body (or part of it). I made some preliminary sketches to set the goal:

My first idea was to create bust made out of a double mold that would recreate the human senses contained in the head (sight, smell, hearing and taste). The outer mold would create the human contour of the bust and the second one would create cavities connected to the sensory holes:

I will start by the generation of the outer mold by a continuous topological transformation of a sphere. For that I would use the freeware software mesh mixer:

I will use the different 3D brushes of the software to transform the sphere into a bust:

I play around with the tools of the program until I get a head and a bust that can serve me as a 3D model to generate the mould:

The interesting thing of this way of modeling is that I will be able to materialize the model in multiple scales.

Once I have generated the mold I import the STL file into the fab modules to generate the paths for the modela to machine the wax. I will start with the rough cut of the front part of the bust:

and then I sent it to the modela:

The rough cut of the wax for the front part of the bust looks like this:

Then I send the paths for the finishing of the wax:

It took the modela around 6 hours to do this!!!... and another 4 hours for the back of the bust... So I guess I will have to forget about the sensory cavities! As it can be appreciated in the photo, a lot of detail from the 3D model was lost.

Once the wax model is finished I then make the silicone mould. I mix the two components:

I mix them together and pour the silicone on the wax mould:

Once the silicone is dry (next day), it is time for casting with dry stone:

I measure the quantities of Dry Stone powder and water, mix them together and pour the mix into the silicone mould:

The result looks like this:

Plenty of detail was lost (the eyes, the mouth and the nose cavities disappeared) and the union of the two molds can be seen perfectly. But with some manual finishing touches it can be fixed:

And now I can reproduce the bust multiple times and define the characteristic most parts of the face (eyes, mouth and nose) in different individual ways... some kind of brotherhood then arises in this small sculptures... being identical but different at the same time!

And now I question myself on the appearance of an agglomeration of similar but yet individualized beings:

?

I guess I should now make some more of these humanized beings to experience the multiplicity of relations between them.