Pop! out come the toys

The silicone had dried early this morning and I was eager to see how this one went. I had my fingers crossed that I had not created any air bubbles when mixing the formulas.

The head of the toy

The tail of the toy

As you can see the Fimo body parts came out of the mould perfectly. Even though the arms broke off when removing the body it still created a perfect mould. This is all that matters as the mould is what I'll be using for the next few weeks. Unfortunately I didn't get a photo of the body of the toy.

Restarting the process

Now that I have a new design and more Supersil I decided that I would start straight away in making my new mould.



I repeated the same process as before but I made a few changes
when making these moulds. The changes were:

Creating the box out of wood so
that it would not leak out 

Creating enough mixture so that
I didn't run short like last time

I also created a mould for each body
part so that it wouldn't be awkward
getting it out of the mould

This photo shows that the wooden box worked perfectly. No silicone dripped out and it wasn't as messy as before.

Running low on materials already?!

I can't believe it! I have only made one silicone mould (which failed terribly) and I have already used half my silicone solution. As a result of this I had to think of a way to use what I had left. My solution was to make a smaller toy, and hopefully the silicone I have left will be enough to make a mould for each body part.

My new toy. Smaller than the original

Above is the new toy that I designed which I will replicate through make a mould for the head, body and tail separately. Since the last toy was made of clay it became soft under the liquid silicone. I didn't want this to happen again so this toy is made of hardened Fimo instead. This way it will remain its original shape and create a better mould.

To make sure that I would definitely have enough mixture to make more moulds I took a journey to my university and bought more Supersil formula. 

More than one problem

Once my silicone had completely dried from yesterdays experimentation I decided to try and pop the toy out of its mould to see if it went well.

 Here you can see that the LEGO broke away easily but left the silicone in a very messy state.

 The feet of the model were the only part sticking out. There was no way I was going to be able to pop it out as easy as I thought.









 To get the model out of the silicone I had to use a scalpel to carefully cut down the side, and pop the body out without ripping the silicone any more.

My plan didn't work! Because of the thin layer I mentioned yesterday the silicone around the head ripped whilst popping the body out of the mould. As a result of this the mould is now useless!

I also realised that clay was not the best material to use in the silicone as it gets soft when wet and left residue in the mould (the silicone starts off as a liquid). As a result of this I will need to use a different moulding material when making my next material.

Creating my first mould

Today was a disaster! To make the silicone mould I had to create some form of box to pour the liquid silicone in. I would place the body part in the box and then cover it completely. Then, as the silicone drys it allows me to pop out the body that was inside and leave the shell of the body. However, as easy as this sounds, it did not go to plan.

The two silicone mixtures

 I was recommended to use LEGO when pouring the liquid as it is easy to make a box out of it and also easy to pull apart when the silicone has dried.
















The problem was that when I poured the silicone into the LEGO it leaked out of the small cracks in the bricks (my LEGO bricks are very old). Also, because it was leaking out of the sides it meant that my mixture wasn't enough to cover the entire body of the toy. This resulted me in having a very thin layer on the top which would be no good when popping the toy out of the silicone.

Silicone didn't quite cover the top of the toy

Making that 'perfect toy'

Since most people previously stated that they preferred the simplistic styled toy I decided to make another version of that, but much bigger so that it would stand out at my presentation at the end of the project.

The shape of this model is slightly different to the blue toy I previously showed to everyone, however I am hoping that when the body parts are all stuck together it will look really good.

Head

Body

Arm that will be used for left and right

Tail

SUPERSIL 25 (1.1KG KIT) STARTER KIT

Today I purchased my silicone mould solution. I was given written instructions to follow as it is very technical to make. To make it easier for me to understand what I had to do I looked on youtube for some tutorials on how to make a silicone mould. The two videos below clearly explain how make a successful silicone mould with the equipment I bought.

Fingers crossed that I don't mess it up and I am able to make a perfect toy mould. Now I just have to make that 'perfect' toy.

Mass Production

After reviewing my current situation with my tutors we all agreed that it would be good to mass produce my simplistic styled toy, as this is what a designer toy company like Kidrobot does.

This is definitely going to be a challenging task as I have no experience in mass producing toys. So to gather as much information as I could I visited the model-making degree downstairs and spoke to the tutors and even some of the students about what I would like to do. One student recommended making a silicone mould so that I could make exact copies of one toy. She explained that I could buy the materials for it in the model-making shop at a very cheap price aswell... YAY! The tutors also recommended this as it would be the most affordable way of me making copies without the use of machinery. 

I now feel a lot better about the idea of mass production. I know what materials I should be using and how much it is roughly going to cost me. Tomorrow I shall purchase some of the silicone solution and begin my mission.

Choosing which toy is best

When I had finished making my two toys I asked people in my class and in my family which one they thought was better and which one they were more likely to buy in a shop.

Simplistic

Realistic

After a day of asking people which toy they felt looked better the Simplistic toy had 13 votes whereas the realistic toy only got 4 votes. I was rather suprised by this and a little dissapointed as I had spent a lot of time making the realistic toy. However, this exercise definitely helped as it taught me which type of toy would be most effective if I was to mass produce it.

Painting my detailed designer toy part 3

 Today I planned on finishing my sculpture. I finished the detail on the face today by painting the bill grey, just like a real platypus, and also highlighting the scars on this face and bill with a different shade of grey. I felt this looked really successful and I was happy as it ended up looking like my character drawings.

To make the clothing more exciting to look at, instead of just different shades of brown, I added little patches of material and painted it in a bright colour such as green or blue. I also added a large pattern on the back to make the clothes look like they have a story behind them. I felt that this made the character look like he is real and has travelled all over Australia and makes him  more believable to other people.

Final painting design of
my platypus sculpture

Painting my detailed designer toy part 2

Today I carried on with the painting of my detailed designer toy. I decided to focus on the skin colour and clothing. This was quite hard to do as they are all different shades of brown. I wanted this toy to be as close to the real colours of a platypus as possible and because of that I made him brown instead of the bright colours of my previous toy.

I made the skin colour a light brown to make it stand out from the clothing he is wearing which is painted a dark brown. When this coat of paint has dried I will add more coats of paint to the clothing and also continue to paint the rest of the model.

Painting my detailed designer toy part 1

Today I decided to think about painting my detailed designer toy. However, my previous designer toys became very sticky after painting them, so I decided to cover my toy in a spray paint that is used to help accept acrylic paint onto models. I bought this spray from a shop called Games Workshop which specialises  in painting small models. As a result of this I am hoping that my sculpture will not be sticky once I have fully painted it.

Here I sprayed my sculpture in the black paint in hope that it will allow me to paint it tomorrow.

Painting my simplistic toy

Here you can see that I started painting my simplistic designer toy. I decided to use bright colours like many of the existing toys I have looked at.

Perry the Platypus

I have based the colours on a cartoon character called Perry the Platypus. Even though platypus' are brown in colour and have black beaks this cartoon character is turquoise blue with an orange beak. Even though the colour scheme is very unrealistic I really liked it. If the toy isn't going to look realistic in shape then it doesn't necessarily have to look realistic in colour.

Final colour scheme for
simplistic toy

Painting my models

Today I started thinking about the colouring of my toys. As I have created two different types of models; Detailed sculpture and simplistic styled toy, I have to think about the different style of colouring that existing designer toys use.

Detailed




This particular toy is very detailed because of the tone in the clothing and hair. It also has accurate detail on the weapons which shows that this toy has had a lot of time spent on it to make it look perfect.








Simplistic







This toy has a lot less detail in the painting. Since the toy doesn't have many detailed parts such as swords, like the toy above, there was no need for so much colouring otherwise the toy would look weird. I like the idea of creating a toy with simplistic style as it looks more appealing.

My detailed sculpture

DAS modelling clay

Today I created a sculpture out of DAS modelling clay that I bought off the internet. It worked really well and I was pleased with the outcome. I used the white version of the clay as I felt this would be the easiest colour to paint over once it is dry.

Here is the final outcome of my sculpture. As you can see there is a lot more detail in this compared to the previous models I made out of Fimo.
I also created clothes for my platypus this time heavily based from the characters in Rango.

Creating my toys - part 2

Here you can see that I started creating my toys based on my character designs.

My platypus design based on
characters from Rango

Unfortunately the Fimo material was very hard to mould and this gave me a lot of trouble when trying to add as much detail as I had put into my drawings. As a result of this I had to mould the Fimo into a much simpler shape. Even though the final outcomes didn't look like my character designs I felt that they still looked really good.

This particular toy was heavily based on the existing designer toy; Dunny. Since I could not create such a detailed model I decided to make it simplistic like the Dunny but still base it on the platypus.

Fimo - Creating my toys

My delivery came today! To help me construct my designer toys I ordered Fimo modelling clay off the internet. This will allow me to start making the designer toys based on my character models that I have recently drawn.

Packet of white Fimo

I decided to order white Fimo as this would be the easiest to paint when it dries. I used this type of modelling clay before when creating Rolf. It was very useful as it dries rock hard and easy to paint.

Rolf made of Fimo

Here you can see that I painted the Fimo with acrylic paint. Since this worked quite well last time I will attempt to paint whatever I make this time. I feel that acrylic paint would be the best paint to used as oil paint would take too long to dry and would leave thick brush marks on the toy.