Making a Bouvier Hanging Plate

[Mike Jordan]

To continue with my casting experiments and to build on what I've learned so far, I decided to try something a bit different than the puzzle piece I did in the other thread. I decided to do a 2 layer casting. I was going to do a small cameo type object, a round plate with a Bouvier on it. But it ended up being a bit bigger than I had originally planned.

First off, I made my clay dog profile out of Sculpey clay. I then rolled a flat piece of Sculpey clay out and cut out a round circle. I placed the dog profile on top of that, stuck some high temp wire in the top (I wanted this to be hangable). Here is a picture of this part:



I then placed this into a 11x11 plastic mold square, sprayed some Pam over the whole thing as a release and mixed up some R&R 910 mold material.

After it had set for a couple of hours I popped the mold out and then pulled the clay forms out. This is what I had after I cleaned up the edges a bit:



Note the wire prongs sticking out of the sides of the 910. The dog profile is about 3/8" deep and the plate is 1/4" deep by about 7" round.

When it was done, I found that the plate area had pulled away from the edges about a 1/16" more than I wanted and the thickness had gone to about 1/8" (I kind of expected that). The dog profile had shrunk a little, but not that much (there was just a little profile shaped indention showing on the back of the plate where it had sunk in a bit. I had also lost the ear. The frit I'd pushed in the ear area had pulled back out just enough to make it look like he didn't have the pointed cropped ears like most of our breed have. Luckily I was able to work around that added a bit more glass to make a natural eared Bouvier. I ground down some of the spikes that happen during the casting and then put it back into the kiln to fire polish. This is what it looked like after the fire polish:



Although the wire loop looks like it's not in very well, it seems to still be pretty solid. If I had used larger size frit or even bigger chunks of glass, It would have been solid around the loop. I can't make the plate part thicker as fusing the extra glass on there will flatten the dog profile... unless I put it back into a mold again. Since this was another experiment, I'll take what I learned and apply it to the next one.


Mike