Creating Molds

Does anyone have experience with creating molds or know of some good tutorials on the subject? I'm hoping to start a new terrain project which utilizes many skulls, and purchasing them would not be reasonable. Sculpting them wouldn't work either as the quantity would be so large that it would be an immense time sink and quality would be lost. For some time, I also have wanted to make molds of barrels and other high utility, simple, but time-consuming objects.

While writing this post, I discovered there is a mold-making page at Hirst Arts which is extremely informative (link is below). I'd still like to hear from any of you who have made molds of your own as Bruce Hirst is a professional, and I'd like to hear from others who have learned themselves.
http://www.hirstarts.com/moldmake/moldmaking.html

I don't know how your skulls should look like, just the face or whole skull (2 piece mold). We use silicon rubber for molds from the company Smooth-On (google it), but it's quite expensive. Other solution is to oil up the skull you want to reproduce, push the green stuff on and wait for it to dry. Demold, and oil up the negative and push the GS in. That way you have a perfect face of the skull.

If you realy need a lot of skulls, maybe we could make them for you, as a commision. If you're interested, let us know how many skulls do you need and how would you want them to look.

Thanx

Tabletop World

I pretty much just followed the guide in the link you provided and it worked really well. My Kroot Chief's Headdress is from just such a mold as are a few of my kroot hounds. The smallest containers of mix will easily carry you through the experimental phase with plenty left over.

well,
to make a mold you have to buy approxmently 30 dollars in meterials (not including your sculpting material or resin to fill the mold)
and if your going to make a skulls mold you would have to di-cast which requires mold release compound.
now if you plan on molding other things than the price is justified, if not i would recommend AJS metals ( http://ajs-metals.com/products/skulls.html )it was started by the current owner of a terrain enthusiast site called terragenesis, he sells metal skulls for cheap (something like 60 for 15 dollars)

hope this helps


-zulu