3d experimentations

These are some of the pictures that I took during the production process of my experimentation. The main experiment I looked at is not yet finished as I added the cement I made on friday to my box which I have to allow time to dry over the weekend. On monday I will see how the experiment turns out and report back to my blog...

Initially I was going to use wooden letters in my mould. I chose a typeface which was bold and would work well in 3D - Impact

I found an open box at home which I thought was perfect for my mould but after speaking to the technicians in the foundry; it was firstly to small and not enough space between the letters. The cement would break to easily so I set out to make a new more spacious box.

Above is my new box I quickly made which had a lot more space and a smooth surface inside so it wouldn't leave any marks on the cement.

I also had to make the letters out of a different material as the wood, would apparently expand and would be very hard to remove from the mould once the cement was dry. So I carefully carved the letters out of styrofoam. I then used the glue gun to secure the letters down, back to front so they would come out the right way when the mould was finished.

Next I mixed my cement I bought with sand. At at ration of 1:3. then adding water to finish it off.

And finally I started to add my cement to my mould, making sure it filled all the gaps in between the letters, especially the 'C' and the 'K'. For future reference it would be a lot easier to make the letters bigger as I reckon you could get more detail and have less problems with the cement breaking in the tight acute areas.

The box was finally filled with cement about 2/ 3cm above the letters. So I will end up with a 6/ 7cm tall block.

Another Idea which I have shown in my sketchbook is to make the block out of wood and not cement. By either carving the letters into the wood or carving the wood around the letters I am not sure I'm really keen on this idea over the medium of cement. I will reflect on this in coming week with hopefully new ideas and finding out weather working in cement will work.