HO Studley

With Studley, the Sculptural Details Are Sublime

You might be getting tired of HO Studley posts, but it is all I am working o these days so it’s pretty much all I have to talk about.  It will all be over soon.

On my final visit to the Studley tool cabinet last October, with the owner’s permission I made a number of silicone rubber molds from the details Studley created and integrated into his masterpiece.  My access to the elements was not perfect, it was an intact artifact hanging on the wall after all, so I chose two part silicone molding putty from Hobby Lobby.  In the past I have used food grade molding putty by the bucketful, but for this project I needed just a bit and the hobby store package was just fine.

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Using it is simple, just take equal parts of the two putties and knead them together until the color is uniform.  Then, in the next 15-20 seconds press the wad against the surface you are trying to mold, sit back, and remove a finished and cured mold in a few minutes.

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Given the spatial logistics of taking impressions from the tool cabinet, the molds were not perfect but they were useful.  Once I got into the swing of producing the elements for the exhibit  “The Henry O. Studley Tool Cabinet and Workbench” (tickets still  available) I made some first generation beeswax castings from those molds just to see what was needed to come up with something exhibit worthy.

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It’s fair to say that all of the castings in the upcoming exhibit were the result of several generations of molds and castings, with many hours spent in refining the representations of the elements under the microscope.  On a project with more available time I might spend a week per element, but in this case I was lucky to carve out a day per element.

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Much like picture from the Mars Rover, the whole is often a composite assembled from the disparate pieces.  Even so, these are not perfect but they will allow the exhibit visitors to get a better sense of what Studley made to embellish his masterpiece.

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In the end, using the molds for casting some pigmented West System epoxy  and some mother-of-pearl I got results that will convey the grandeur of these elements up-close-and-personal for the exhibit patrons as this panel will be sitting on the replica workbench for touching and examining closely.

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As time allows I will detail the process of refining specific elements, with observations about both moldmaking and casting materials useful to the decorative artisan.