Plaster Cast Relief Sculptures

Casting plaster is a fun way to learn about bas relief sculptures. For this project, I took my students on a little walk around our school campus to find leaves and flowers. 

Then we rolled out a slab of clay, preferably not terracotta, arranged some plants on top of it, and rollecd it again to press the plants into the clay. The ones with needles worked best: rosemary, cyprus, etc. Picking all the little plant parts can be hard, but it's best to start with the stem and then pleal it back gently.

I made shallow boxes of mat in standard frame sizes: 5"X7", 6"X8", 8"X10". The boxes only had to be about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch deep to allow for a 1/4" thick slab and plaster. Once I put the clay in the bottom of the box, I tapped up the corners. Students mixed plaster powder with water and once it was the consistency of pancake powder, they poured it into the box, on top of the clay. We pealed the box away from the clay/ plaster layers and then pealed the clay away from the plaster. The plaster is strong enough to rinse off some of the mis-color, and even some gentle rubbing with a paint brush under the stream of water.

For any Print or Braille words, it is important to write (carve or emboss) everything into the clay in reverse. The plaster will be a mirror image of the clay. So mind your P's and Q's. 

For students who wanted to add a little color, they could use water color pencils. Everyone was amazed at how clear and accurate the casting was. The details are wonderful and the finished product is one everyone "felt" great about.

 

Repoussé project

 The word repoussé comes from the French word, "to push" and essentially means to push the metal from the back of a piece of metal foil to create an embossed image. 

This was the first project in my class unit on relief sculpture. It is an easy way to create tactile images for my students who are blind.

Students began with sketches of ideas, one of which they chose to transfer to a thick piece of tooling foil. If the foil is set on a piece of chip board or stack of paper you can trace a drawing with a pen and it will transfer to the foil with embossed lines. But my blind students had to re-"draw" their ideas using Wiki Stix, which they could then trace to make the embossed lines.

Rubbing with a rounded plastic stick pushes the foil from back to the front to make your the front raised or budge out. Then rubbing around the form with a flat stick makes it pop out even more. Edges are re-defined and cleaned up with sharp pointed points. For large areas, we found the lids or bottoms of fat Sharpie markers worked pretty well for repoussé.

Then most students opted to color their images with Sharpies. These colors are more bright and permenant than our normal Mr. Sketch on the foil.

Then students painted the entire surface with black paint, whether they'd colored the surface or not. It's important to get into the cracks so the lines show up on the final product.

While the paint is still wet, begin wiping gently in circular motions with a paper towel. You'll go throughs several of them as they get dirty pretty quickly. You want the raised portions to really have a shine, while the cracks should be able to stay black. Reveal as many details as possible without overwiping.

Younger children can wrap boards with thick string or yarn and cover it with aluminum foil and just rub with their fingers to make an embossed foil project. This student chose to use greens and blues to fill the shapes using Sharpie markers.