Wow it's been so long since I've updated I've nearly forgotten how to do this. Okay so this update is going to be a work in progress- I'm going to keep updating it as I have a lot of pictures to put up, and I will continue to gather more over the next few weeks, hopefully those of you interested in having a topper made will enjoy (and appreciate) seeing a bit of behind the scenes work on them. 

I decided a little while ago that I'd like to take my cake toppers out and get more people interested in them. Making cake toppers has it's good and bad points, they're great because they get you sculpting likenesses, folds in fabric, hands, working to a deadline and working with clients, but they can be repetative and sometimes you just wanna sculpt a cool monster or something a bit more imaginative.

Anyway I decided to hire a table at a wedding show later this month so that people can have a look at the actual sculpts and see the work that goes into them, but that means I've gotta have some nice pieces to display, and that they've gotta be hard wearing. So I've been pretty busy and I've still got a way to go yet.

So here's my desk at the moment...

The piece to the left was made a while ago for a client and luckily I still have the moulds so I just had to cast up the pieces again and put them together. The piece on the right is a whole new piece that I'm making just for this show, if you've ever visited my facebook page you've probably seen this already. The piece in the middle is a long story. This was the first wedding topper I ever made and as such it was pretty big, more of a statue than something to put on your cake, it was just a self promotional piece so I still had the sculpt, but it was not fit for exhibition...

Original sculpey piece to the left, improved resin casting on the right...

I only ever intended this piece to be seen from the front, so there was never any detail in the back of either the groom or the bride, and the piece was made from sculpey and had been baked so I couldn't work into it anymore. I decided the only way to fix this and make the piece presentable was to take a wax casting of it, then I could work into it again and then cast that up in resin, far more work that I had anticipated!

After making some moulds and casting in wax, then making some improvements I had this...

You can see the original version on my commissions page for now before I replace it with the improved version. I resculpted most of the groom, and had to remake the brides arms and hands, I was unhappy with the way they were originally holding hands so this was fixed. After some more improvements they were ready for moulding.

It's not often that a piece can be moulded in one, they usually have to be cut up and moulded in seprate parts, this was no exception and had to be cut into eight pieces, some of them you can see here....

The parts are divided in half along what will be the seam line and one half is covered with water based clay, this will eventually be replaced with silicone...

A wall of foam core is glued around the piece...

And then silicone is poured in...

Then the foam core is removed and the piece turned over, leaving something like this, it can take up to 24 hours for the silicone to cure....

This is cleaned up and then repeated for the other side, the exposed silicone is coated with petroleum jelly so that the new silicone will not stick to it (very important!!!)...

More to come soon....