Cold Cast Bronze Resin Casting Tutorial

cold cast bronze process in this tutorial we're going to cover a realistic bronze finish over a resin sculpture this is a face cast mold we'll be casting into today this was done using plat SIL gel 25 with a mother mold made with plaster bandages and we did that off of a life cast that had been rescued and then molded as its sat on a work bench not actually molded from someone's face now one of the important things we'll need for a good realistic cold cast bronze is of course bronze powder so we're using this is a one pound jar of bronze powder and bronze powder powder depending on how you use it can go a long way now this particular process uses a fair amount of bronze powder but that's the main ingredient the bronze powder the black pigment ez-flo 60 resin and some paper cups and a bigger mixing Cup and you'll see how all that works together here in just a minute the you also need a throwaway brush of course because any brush that touches resin is going to brush heaven now I like to use a ratio of roughly 1 to 1 to 1 one part bronze powder to 1 part a to 1 Part B of the polyurethane resin and one of the reasons we're using the ez-flo 60 resin over say ez-flo 95 is we want this to be a fairly fast setting resin because if it takes too long it's going to allow the bronze powder to settle out and we risk not having a really shiny bronze finish on the surface if it settles out in one area we might have a really shiny area in some dull areas now we're also going to add some black pigment and we add that to the Part B and we want to add enough that we get a nice charcoal gray and that is just to help us with if there's any place where the bronze powder doesn't get evenly dispersed we don't wind up with a bare spot of white resin because ez-flo 60 by itself is going to cure bright white so this just ensures just gives us some added safety there to make sure that we don't have any bear resin showing through now the first thing you'll need to do is pour in your bee into your bigger mixing Cup and pour the bronze powder into the bee and mix that up and the reason you want to do that first is easy flow 60 sets up really fast it's a two and a half minute working time and use up a good 45 seconds of that just in the mixing process so by mixing the bronze powder into our bee and it's really thick so it's going to take a little bit of effort to really stir that in that saves us some time later on and makes that a mix in a lot easier now we're mixing in our a and we can stir all those components together and now the clock starts ticking now as I've stated before in previous videos when you're working with resin in small amounts it's a really good idea to convert over to the weight ratio rather than the volume ratio because when you're working in really small amounts it gets very difficult to properly eyeball those amounts so this is about the smallest sized batch that I will measure by eye anything smaller than this and I really feel more comfortable mixing it using a gram scale now as soon as I pour that out I have to immediately get my brush in there and start moving that around if we let that sit too long in one place that bronze powder because it's so dense starts to settle down against the face of the mold and right now we really need to move it around so that we can evenly coat the entire inside of the mold and this really is more resin than I need for this particular face we probably could have done two faces with this side batch size batch if we had poured it the excess into a separate mold but again this the smallest sized batch that I'm comfortable mixing up and feel like we get a really good mix ratio with it when you start going smaller than that you really start to get dangerous and what we have to do here is just keep this moving around and sloshing that around the inside of the mold until the resin sets up you don't want to leave this alone just pour it and walk away because you'll wind up with again really shiny spots at the lowest part of the mold and dull spots Ward's up on the sides now once that starts to gel ready to move on to the next step of the process and for that what we're going to do is back this up with straight easy flow sixty resin and there's a variety of ways you can approach it at this point for this process we're going to keep this fairly simple we just are going to use the easy flow sixty just mixed a and B together no fillers or anything like that but if you wanted to to lower the cost you could mix your easy flow sixty a and B and then also add some of our glass filler or some of the neutral density filter and that will further knock down the cost because that's really what makes resin casting expensive when you start doing big pieces like faces or full heads and you start casting them solid another approach to this would be to backfill this with foam which is much less expensive but doesn't have the weight of solid resin now again you'll notice that we measured out our Part B and we added pigment and we stirred in that pigment and now we're adding our Part A and I'm just using the graduated lines on the side of the cup this time and once we get those put together we want to stir that up and get that poured into the mold as soon as we can because again we don't have a huge amount of working time so we want to move fast and one of the things I'm going to do here is I'm going to embed some hanging hardware in this piece so I can hang it on our wall so this is just a piece of a coat hanger that I cut down and used some pliers there to bend it into a little notch there so it will hang on a nail and I'm just going to carefully hold that right there at the top of the head so that when the resin sets up it will set up around that piece of coat hanger and that will be permanently set in the resin and there goes its kicked off and our resin has set and now we're ready to de mold our finish cast now a part like this because it's a very thick mass of resin it's going to set up very fast so typically you can D mold a face cast like this in about ten minutes and here I'm just trimming down the excess on the top of the face there so it's all flush with the resin that we poured solid and now ready to shine it up and expose that bronze powder now it's important that we use for ott steel wool that's what I'm polishing it up here you don't want to use too OTT three OTT and certainly not one on if you do it's so course and so abrasive you actually wind up sanding through that layer of bronze powder and if you do polish through that layer of bronze powder and resin you wind up with bare spots of just plain ez-flo resin showing through now once we've polished our piece and exposed all that bronze powder and gotten a good shine we need to blow off any excess steel wool from the polishing process and I just use some canned air to do that and the reason you want to be careful to blow that off is if it stays in place and you do any kind of patina later on that could actually form rust and that's very difficult to remove so you want to make sure you blow that all off before you continue with this next step now we're going to use some of the sculpt nouveau colored waxes we're using green and brown sculpt nouveau wax and both of these waxes you might have seen these in some of our other tutorials these are very good waxes for using with cold cast bronze because once they're applied they they're really almost impossible to remove they have a very nice tough coating that protects the finish in addition to the color it adds now because this piece is still warm fresh out of the mold when I start brushing that wax on it goes into solution and really spreads out nice and this this is the brown wax I'm applying here and what that Brown wax does when I stipple that in and work that into the surface it gives us the equivalent of a base patina or a brown patina that would typically be achieved using a liver of sulfur or a darkening patina or something like that but that brown wax will help us achieve that classic bronze look now in addition to that once we've wiped off the excess and allowed that to dry and that's an important step you want to make you allow that layer of wax to to dry for 20 or 30 minutes before you add additional wax because you don't want to reactivate that solvent and you'll do that if you do that too fast we're now going to come back with some green wax and what this is going to do is just hint it a little bit of oxidization that's happened on the surface so the Green wax we're just going to brush that on just like we did with a brown wax and once we've completely coated the surface of our sculpture we're going to do the same thing we're going to use a soft cloth or a paper towel to pull back any excess wax and that's an important step if you wait too long to try to wipe off any excess wax it will be there permanently so that's important to make sure that after you apply that wax wait about five minutes or so for some of that wax to really grab on to the surface and then wipe off any excess and polish that back before it completely sets up because once it sets and cures this is a very strong wax that almost feels like a hard plastic finish on the surface and now once our wax has dried and cured we're ready to hang our piece on the wall and we have a nice finished piece that looks just like real bronze except that it's resin and much less expensive and all of the products we've used in this tutorial I'm going to put links in those in the video description if you want to find the sculpt Nouveau section we have a huge selection of scope nouveau patinas and waxes and all kinds of things that will really help your cold cast bronzes look that much more realistic so be sure to check those out and also I'll put a link for the resins and some of the resin additives and there you have the cold cast bronze process and of course all the supplies used in this tutorial are available on our web store at brick in the yard calm

Channel: Brick In The Yard Mold Supply

Views: 85,469

Keywords: cold cast bronze, cold casting, resin casting tutorial, molding and casting, resin cast, resin casting process, bonded bronze, faux finish, faux bronze finish, brick in the yard, brickintheyard, bity mold supply

Id: f3VytrsZRTo

Length: 10min 56sec (656 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 12 2016