A slow day, wanted to take the day a bit easier. Toned the panels and traced over the drawings for the Pat Benatar paintings. Then got to work repairing a sculpture which Paul gave us a few years ago. It was bought second hand, and pardon the pun that it was sold without a right hand. It had broken off in its earlier life. I decided to model a new one.
First I filled the arm hole with Sculptamold, a mix of plaster and paper fragments which is a wonderful material to use. Its only downside is that it has a rough, oat-porridge-like texture, it can't be perfectly smoothed. As a gap filler it's wonderful, and it's very tactile and easy to model with. Then, modelled a hand from grey Milliput. I remember buying a pile of it cheaply, but it's rubbish stuff. The only good Milliput is the fine white, and even that isn't very good. Milliput is often flaky and dry, and a nightmare to mix. It remains flaky and stiff, and can crack and behave in generally horrible ways when using it. It sticks to everything , except itself, and stains everything badly, so it ruins gloves and tools, while falling off the sculpture that it is supposed to grip. I may throw away the lot I have.
Air-dry water-based clay is a little easier to handle but shrinks badly. This doesn't stick to itself (and will fall apart when dry) and has far too many other flaws to be useful professionally - but I use it for lighting models because it is cheap. Oil plasticine (or other oil-based clays) are by far the best thing to model with, but they don't dry. I'd love an oil-based clay which dries very slowly like oil paint. Perhaps a mix of clay, a linseed oil (stand oil?) and a resin, like Laropal A81 in some solvent, might make an interesting material. Would Laropal alone make a clay? It may be too sticky, and this would set by evaporation so may also shrink.
Anyway, the hand was modelled over a few hours to an adequate degree.
It's impossible to match the mirror silver finish, so I've painted it with oil size mixed with mars black, then applied artificial silver leaf. This gives a wrinkled, tin-foil type of finish, but may look better when all dry and cleaned up. While working on it, I pressed too hard and the hand came off (proof that Milliput doesn't stick well, it's also rather weak as a material; almost every other epoxy clay I've tried has been smoother, stronger, and stickier). I glued the hand back with viscous superglue. Now it's all drying.
