Most of the plastics work that I do is with SmoothOn products, with one main exception. When I’m doing stuff that’s transparent, I most like working with a clear polyester casting resin made by “Castin’ Craft”, available at art supply stores for about $30 for a quart. I like it because it’s surprisingly bubble-free for home use without a vacuum pump (and it’s fluid enough that bubbles generally rise out of the resin as it’s curing), and it also demolds in about eight hours. Let me post three things that I’ve made with it recently, starting with this “fingerbulb”. I cast the fingertip in clear resin, and then added a polymer clay holder for a red LED and then painted it all to make it seem like one piece. When you give it power, the fingernail, which is the only unpainted bit, lights up BRIGHT red. Perhaps I should have done more layers of paint, because the light is so strong that it actually leaks right through the sides. Looks pretty neat though. Not sure what project it’s going to be for though.
I made another finger project to see how a two-layer paintjob would work. That is, there’s a first layer that’s mostly red, and then a small section of orange/yellow stripes, with the skin color on top. I was happy to see that it’s quite visible. The trick to getting the fingernail totally glass-transparent was to spray it with a glossy top layer — the same trick that you use to turn frosted glass into something totally transparent.
Finally, I miscalculated how much resin to mix up, so I poured the excess into the original cat mold for Nefarious’s chess set (before the pieces had a base — that is, the original sculpture) and then painted it up as something akin to the Cheshire Cat. It also has glow in the dark eyes.
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