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  What trip to Ventura would be complete without a visit to the Ventura beach!
I
have been contemplating creating a series of sculptures based on
traditional Japanese themes which I plan on naming Techno-Kyoto and I
felt the best medium to use would be Styrofoam. I had never worked in
Styrofoam before and so I went to Ventura's Fletcher Chouinard Designs
surfboard shop and they donated a pick-up truck load of Styrofoam
off-cuts for me to experiment with. Well no sooner did I get home
then I was offered a commission to create four cartoon characters out
of Styrofoam for a trade show exhibit. I thought I would use this
commission to experiment and refine my technique for working in this
medium. What follows is
what I have learned from this process.  Sketching I
then cut a silhouette through the entire block with a hand saw. Carving I then started carving the silhouette at
right angles to rough shape the figure.  The carving knife got about 80% of the job done but to begin to refine the shape I found the best tool was a large rasp. The rounded side was useful for carving inner curves and the flat side good for smoothing out planes and surfaces. With any complex three dimensional shape you are going to find places that are almost impossible to get at with any kind of sander, but a neat trick I read about and used with modest success is to hot glue sandpaper to paint stirring sticks. I also hot glued sandpaper to 1/2" and 1" diameter doweling which was useful for sanding small inside curves. With these sticks you could reach in and sand places your hand could never fit through.  Coating Once the foam figures were carved and sanded the next stage is the coating. There is a lot of debate over what type of coating is best and each has its advantages and disadvantages as well. For industrial projects like outdoor sculptures of the type found in amusement parks, fiberglass is the the preferred coating, but fiberglass has big drawbacks, especially for your average non-industrialized artist. Firstly, fiberglass resin is expensive and will quadruple the material costs. Plus it adds a lot of weight to the sculpture almost negating the whole point of carving in Styrofoam. And as anyone who has worked with the stuff can tell you, it's bloody goddamn awful to work with and will make a mess of everything. You need to mix the resin components together and forget about trying to clean the buckets. You have to just throw them away and use news ones each time. If all that is not bad enough, you are working with toxic chemicals. The fumes are noxious and you would need a good ventilation system if working indoors. Then the dust from sanding is doubly toxic and so you would need to wear a professional dust mask. Other alternatives include various types of resins, the most commonly used being epoxy resins. These have all the drawbacks of fiberglass resins with the only advantage is that some are slightly less toxic. The other alternatives are water-based coatings such as cement, plaster, and gypsum. I prefer water based over oil based any day since the clean-up is so much easier, and there are seldom any toxic fumes. I experimented with all three. The cement is useful only if you wish the final result to resemble poured concrete or stone since the finish is course and granular. The plaster was easier to work with and dried nice and smooth but was just too soft and fragile. You could carve it with a fingernail and any bump would knock a whole chunk of plaster off at a time. I settled on a gypsum based plaster call Durham's Water Putty which was fairly cheap, easy to mix, and dried much harder than plaster. However, again there were two drawbacks. First, the drying time was fast, ten minutes, and so you could only mix as much as you could use up in ten minutes. (You could slow the drying time by adding acrylic paint or vinegar but this would also compromise the final hardness) With a project of this size I had to mix close to a hundred batches. Second, as hard as the water putty is, it still cracks easily. The problem is with the Styrofoam which is very soft. Fifteen pounds of water putty covered a single figure to the depth of a quarter inch but this would still crack fairly easily. The manufacturer instructions doesn't recommend a coating thicker than a half inch which would have made the figures too heavy again and still wouldn't prevent cracking that much more.  My solution to the coating problem was to glue several layers of tissue paper over the gypsum plaster creating a kind of laminate. This resulted in a vinyl-like coating that was flexible. This way, even if the figure was bumped hard enough to crack the plaster, the damage would not be catastrophic since this final layer would keep the the plaster intact and instead of cracking and flaking off, would result in merely a dent. I finished the figures with acrylic paints and a final hard shell high gloss acrylic varnish.   I have not read of anyone else using this tissue paper laminate and so I thought I would offer it as a possible solution to the coating problem. This method is light and durable, economical, and easy to work with. Final Thoughts Although the 1lb density foam I used for this project is the standard for theatrical and movie sets and props, I found the denser 2.5 lb density foam used by the surfboard makers to be superior in terms of creating a slick finish. The 1lb foam was nearly impossible to achieve a smooth finish with. Also, I had hoped that the water putty would be strong enough to prevent cracking and so I never intended to use the tissue laminate technique, but if I were to do it again I would have used the plaster coating underneath the laminate since the plaster gave a longer working time and I could have shaped the details much like a potter or clay sculpture would rather than carve the details from the hardened gypsum coat. So that's all! Feel free to write me if you have any questions or comments |
