After some elbow grease, I'd managed to clean most the Ice Resin off my poor battered test clip, and got out the mold and mold release. There's still a thin, thin layer of Ice Resin in some parts of the mold, so I knew I'd have to sit down and spend forever picking that out for any real work. But for this I was just looking for a general test to see if the pattern would work and if the epoxy sculpture mix would hold to a clip.
Here we are all set up with the clip, the mold and a mold-releasing compound:
The first thing I did was mix up a little bit of the compound and press it into one of the cleaner parts of the mold to see what sort of pattern I got. Not too bad.
The I rolled some out and pressed it into the mold:
Then pressed the Ficcare into that. The modling compound is cool in that it acts like a clay, but sticks and cures like an epoxy. If this worked, it'd self-adhere to the metal clip.
And after it'd cured for a few hours I popped it out:
The bad news is that it wasn't quite centered and wound up being a little shorter at the top because the clip shifted. Rather than stop the test, I pulled off the coating with the intent to transfer it to an Avian clip to finish up the plans for making it silver and seeing how the finish goes:
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| That's another test clip on the left, I was practicing Violet marbling for a faux border, but since it wasn't centered, I'm just covering it up with the Primavera test. |
That mostly worked, but I had to cut off the silver bits that stuck out the top with my Dremel
And then I let it dry:
The pattern got a little muddy with me screwing with it so much, but its promising. After this I cleaned up the edges, filling in the gaps and then sanding them smooth.
The next step is to primer and apply silver leaf and see how the finishing process goes.
