Creating my Mould 1

I bought a pore-less tray to create my sculptures on and starting moulding the clay. I had an image of a tentacle in front of me whilst I was sculpting so I could get the most realistic shape. I kept my tentacles quite short because I thought they would make a big enough impact and I didn't want them to look comical. I made my tentacles slightly thicker at the bottom and then thinner towards the top, however then I added the bobble on the top which I bended over to give the accurate shape of a snail tentacle. I was really happy with the shape and how smooth I made them; however when it came to actually making the mould, I realised that this shape was not going to work. I wouldn't be able to put the latex tentacles out of the mould because the end bobble wouldn't be able to fit past the smaller opening underneath it. Therefore I would either have to cut each tentacle out individually, which would waste product and mean I would have to make the moulds over and over again if I wanted to test the tentacles out, or I would have to change the shape of the tentacles. 

I also realised that I would have to use up a lot of silicone to make this mould, so I should put all four tentacles in one cup so that I wouldn't have to use as much.

I decided to change the shape of my sculptures so that I could easily pull them out my mould and then re-use the mould if necessary. I discussed this with my teacher and we came up with three possibilities of how this would work. My first option would be to make the mould in a straight up position and then put a thin wire through the latex once if had set and use this to bend the piece into shape; however this still wouldn't allow me to give it a thicker ball on the top as, even if the ball was straight, it still wouldn't be able to be pulled out of the mould. My next option was to place a glass ball at the end of my sculpture, shape the clay around the ball and then remove the ball before making a mould out of it, and then replacing the ball one the piece had been made; however I think this would be very difficult to blend the ball into the latex piece perfectly, without making the latex around the ball really thin, would would probably cause it to break off when being pulled out of the mould. My last option was to make the sculptures go straight up and into a point and then add another sculpting product one the latex piece had set to create the bend bobble on the top. I think this would be the easiest and most reliable to way to achieve the look I want.

Below is an image of the newly shaped moulds in my latex solution of A and B.

I left my mould about 3 days to set and it still hasn't completely set! My other mould that I'd done, was not as tall as this one, but it had set within about an hour so I was very confused as to why this one hadn't. I decided to remove my sculpture from my mould even though I knew it hadn't set properly because I thought that if it hadn't set after 3 days then I had done something wrong! When I took it out the silicone completely collapsed and it didn't hold the shape of my clay at all. Looking back at what I did when making my mould, I remembered that I forgot to mix the two silicones together! This had meant that they hadn't been able to combine and set properly.