HOW TO EDIT & REPAIR PLASTER CASTINGS hydrostone gypsum cement bonded resin

Hey guys it's John Burns with John Burns Fine Art. I have my hydrostone casting of my sleeping children and today I wanted to go over the editing methods that I use to clean up plaster castings and similar castings of that nature. So we'll be using a variety of tools and techniques and I encourage you to look at the description down below just to look at some of the books and items that I used in the making of this project but also just a little more information that you may find interesting such as my Instagram link and things like that. So if you like this video of course hit the like button and if you're interested in seeing more videos like these please click the subscribe button and select all notifications so you can stay current with my videos as I release them. So all right let's get going. Thanks for coming over. I'd just like to start out by pointing out the light sources here. I have one here one here. This is the proper light setup for detail work with sculpting. If you're in a studio that's well lit like daylight and all that you can go ahead and throw up your primary and secondary forms and stuff like that but when you get down to the last detail tertiary details you really want to be able to see contrast. So the shadows on these is on the apex directly with my eye which is perpendicular with the light sources. As the light sources come in you can see these crisp lines. I have a semi dark background here and a dark background so that when the light hits this I can see the outline perfectly. This is good for cleaning up objects to make them extraordinarily smooth. You can see every little subtle ripple and nuance in the surface with this type of setup. So regardless of a plaster casting you can do that for all modeling when you get to that stage in the finishing work of your sculpture. So I can see some of these lines here. I don't know if you can see that line right there across the hair. These are some of the easiest areas to hide. There are a lot less conspicuous once they start to get cleaned up because we can use that hair to hide our work here. The one thing that I really hate about working on wet plaster and I think I'm going to stop until this gets dried a little better is that it tends to come out in chunks or break. You know where like when something's drier it just it's a lot more brittle and in this wet stage it just kind of wants to like clump as you cut. I don't know how else to really describe it. And also you know like sanding that would probably be a good way to test it. If you can sand it without gumming up your sandpaper it's probably in a good state to do the edit. Anyway I hope you can see this so far that that's looking a lot better and nobody's going to be able to see that once I'm done with it. You know and it has bronze acrylic on it. So anyway I'm going to go ahead and stop for now and wait until this is really dry. Okay so this has been a few days. This feels a lot drier. Some areas seem to be incredibly more dense than others so it may take a little more work. I'm not quite sure why that happened but anyway I do have my light sources set up. This is going to help us make sure that we can get our seam lines knocked down to where they need to be. You can also use dental tools so you can order these dental tools online and maybe try your hand at self-cleaning your teeth. Just a little generic folding knife. I don't even know where it came from. I can't remember. So there we go. These are what I'm going to be using and I don't think I necessarily talked about this. So when we have a seam say like we have a seam coming straight down this right straight we don't want to just drag it down. It leaves a flat line and it's obvious. When you see three-dimensional objects in department stores go ahead and pick them up and take a look to see where you can see the seam lines because it's very very likely that everything that you pick up in a store has the seam lines. It's a multiple piece mold. Anyway so here's the remedy for that. When you have a straight line just move around with the contour of the form so as you're going over or pull it this way. The best you can. I know it's very tempting and sometimes we do scrape it straight down but try to move from the bottom across to the upper or vice versa up or down to the lower. The idea is that we're working this around gradually and not making that flat cut. So that's what I'm doing here. So if any of your lines don't look quite the way you want them to and you want to sand them down a little bit this is dry enough that I can use sandpaper. So this is a 220 grit and then I used a 400 grit if you really want to smooth it up and make it you know smooth. It actually ends up being smoother than my brush texture that I did originally so that might not be favorable because it might really stand out but we'll see how it goes. And here I had the seam coming up here as you can see. I just took my knife and took it sideways really tried to incorporate the shape and not just focus on eliminating the line. Eliminating the line alone you know you might achieve your goal there but the idea is to follow the drapery while eliminating the line. So with the hair we can obviously see the movement of the hair goes back you know this way and the line comes across this way so this is favorable because even if we I mean if we scrape this straight down we might have a problem but I can kind of scrape it with my knife held in the direction of the hair as I come down it and this might really be fortuitous the way that this is set up. So at first I'm just digging down just let my knife kind of dig down to break that hard edge. Now when this sets up and gets really kind of dry you'll be able to tell that the surface is actually harder. So this outermost epidermis of sorts is going to be harder once you get through that top superficial layer the plaster underneath suddenly gets softer and it'll probably continue that way down indefinitely but the point is is that as you break this skin on the top it might kind of fracture slightly and as you try to gently gradient this you're going to be working on the soft stuff too so don't be too hyper with working the tool because you might have irreparable damage and then you just have to kind of sculpt a new form and you know that's kind of risky business. So as you can see that's starting to clean up there and you know we're not trying to make it look completely like what it was before this is like camouflage you're trying to derail the viewer's attention from the hair where you've the seam line and don't get neurotic about it you might know it's there but over time you'll appreciate your handiwork and see that you did enough your work was excellent and you didn't have to go to town trying to recreate what was originally there before you molded it you know what I'm saying. I can see a line here going down I don't like that so I'm going to try to break that I think that's going to work there's enough variations to break that up and dragging it that way wasn't the best I'm just going to move it back this way seems like when I push the blade forward I'm getting better results instead of dragging the blade seems like it's really plowing the earth here this way and it gives me a little deeper cut so I have to be careful not to gouge very gingerly and thinking about the lines here you know where these lines might be flowing from I went ahead and finished getting this cleaned up here this is just a chip brush and you know you can go over dry plaster with this and it may you know plaster pairs is soft enough this may act as kind of like a sanding type thing this hydrostone I don't know I've never mixed it this hard before so this was either a really wonderful batch of hydrostone or I just mixed it up in a way that really it's just hard if this is the hardest plaster I've ever had hydrostone is normally like 25 times harder than plaster of paris so if you're deliberately trying to carve in to plaster use plaster of paris or I believe pottery plaster would work you know if you turn on a fan so you can get a box fan a 20 inch by 20 inch box fan and go get one of those 20 inch by 20 inch house filters and just turn on your fan and throw that thing on the back the fan's force will suck it up against the back and then just point the fan towards the door and or you know at least away from you and all these particles and things like this will get sucked into that filter and then you know the air recycles in the room the backing to get one for every room so there we go that looks pretty good and this is my tip tight bond this is wood glue just remember our guy got his leg broken off here okay so just to wrap this up I glued this back together there's a little bit of chippage out of here we can patch that up so I took that seam line down tried to contour it and on here I also had to do the same thing it did not match up here so after this dried about 30 probably like 45 minutes went by I went ahead and reshaped this and you know made it come together that way so and it's probably better that you don't wait much longer than that because any of the excess glue that comes out over here is still much more pliable than once it sets so one of my teachers told me during undergrad that it's best to glue two pieces together and set them to the side and grate another two pieces and you know glue those together and set them to the side and so on and so on but don't try to glue a mass of pieces together at one time it just doesn't work so you're slowly building things back up to one form so now that this is glued I'm going to go ahead and glue this on here and once this is glued on I can get a little bit of patch maybe I could take some glue and mix it up with some of the the dust here from the back from getting that flat and then I can just rub that in there and then you know if I need to I can sand it down and then it'll be ready for paint and I can get this up on top of my clock so I'm pretty excited about that and in fact why don't we just go ahead and do it we'll do this together so all I'm doing right here is mixing this glue with some of this dead plaster it's the dust and that should give me like a type of paste see it's clumped up like that that should be pretty good and maybe what I'll do is with the the dull side of my knife maybe try to squeegee it into the crack and then with the sharp side you're basically making like a wood filler and really what we're trying to achieve here is something that can carry the acrylic paint over the surface and not have that wound showing now this is going to be you know fragile just because of the nature you know we've got hydrostone which is a gypsum cement and it's still breakable so we want to be very careful I'm just going to use a little sandpaper it'll probably gum up somewhat and I can see where that's elevated but the leg kind of has that repeating pattern the way it is so to me that's satisfactory all right so it's pretty decent and then I can maybe take my chip brush and make sure that there's no dust inhibiting that there so what I want to do here is I'm just this is just a wet cloth I'm going to put that on there because I really want this glue to you know it's a it's a water based glue I just want to make sure that I can get this glue to do what I need it to do into the hydrostone before you know the plaster sucks all the water out of it all right so that shouldn't take long to actually start bonding and hold but there we are so that's going to be the final piece okay here we are the finished product legs glued on and uh touched up there you see the seam line is gone from the arm down the hands off the feet up here is cleaned up this is now flat on the back the seam line came over the hair and over his hair it's touched up and it came down his neck over his collar down the back of his sleeve down his arm over his fingertips down the leg and down here over this cloth so it's all cleaned up and uh got the back flat and got that off that's where the studs were and these holes are okay just some air bubbles and that'll all cover up with paint fine so there we go casting a hydrostone and doing the edits there so happy days I hope you guys have luck with this and enjoy casting next time you see it it's going to be on top of my clock thanks for coming along