Building scenery
Going up in height and sculpturing with bioplastics
Intro
This week I will be focussing on creating scenery for the board. I will be sculpturing with bioplastics and paint them with natural dye, made from things around me.
Making an earthy color palette with natural paint
In order to bring some life into my scenery I decided to make my own paint with things that are around me. For now, I am just concentrating on making some mountains and rocks. So the colors I would need are: black, grey and brown. Because I am going to cover my bioplastic sculptures with lime plaster, which is grey, I dont need to make grey anymore.
Black
I collected some very dark soil/dirt from outside next to the road so it may contain a bit of asphalt as well which will make it extra black.
I then added about a spoon of water and some cooked coconut oil so. I cooked the coconut oil so that it would melt. When i mixed the oil with the soil it became more of a thicker paint texture instead of a water color, it was more concentrated. Some people put icing in it instead of coconut oil, but unfortunately I didnt had that in my house but coconut oil worked just as good.
This is how the black turned out on paper
You still see a bit of the soil textures but I don't mind it since I am making a landscape and it fits perfectly with it. You could eventual blow the dirt away or wipe it with a brush so that there is only paint left.
Brown
I basically did the same with brown as I did with black. I made two shades of brown. One with cinnamon and one with coffee.
This is just regular coffee, I opened up a coffee pad and poured it into a jar.
This is the cinnamon I used, it is a lighter brown than the coffee. I wanted to have 2 browns so that I could create more depth in the mountains and hills I was going to make.
This is how they turned out on paper:
The cinnamon paint is a bit thick because I used quite a bit of coconut oil but I think this has a nice earthy texture and can come in handy when creating a base.
This is the coffee paint and is less thick than the cinnamon but can be used as shading the darker parts for the scenery.
I am quite happy how it turned out, I might need to make some other colors later on if I want to make a river or grass texture for example so maybe I might need green and blue.
Making the material
I was looking for something that was firm but something I could still take some pieces off for the sculpturing, so I chose the sawdust & dextrine recipe, found here. Because I needed an insane amount of it I did al the ingredients x27.
Sawdust
Dextrin
Water
81 grams
100 grams
94,5 ml
The dextrine I bought at van Beek for about €3,60. For the sawdust I went to Vomar and bought 56 liters for about €2,50. It is 100% natural and recycble.
When mixing the dextrine with water tand then boiling it it was 1 big piece, but the longer you boil it the more liquid it became.
When the dextrin was ready I mixed it up with the sawdust in a bowl. After about two days, this is what it looked like (this was just a piece of the mould I poured it into).
I then stacked them up a bit to get the form of a small mountain.
I needed something to make it more firm and give it another texture. I needed something that I can connect different parts of the sawdust with. That is why I bought this lime plaster at gamma (€2,- for 1 kg). I actually wanted another kind of plaster, the model plaster one but unfortunately this one was sold out. With the 'snel gips' it dried very fast (15min) so I had to work quickly.
100% natural plaster
The gypsum of Knauff is actually a 100% natural product. It is in certain places in the earth. Knauff's fabrics are located at gypsum quarries. Knauff's policy is: what we get from nature should also be given back to nature. Gypsum quarries that are no longer used are set up as new nature reserve. This involves collaborating with universities to achieve a more diverse growth of flora and fauna than there was before the qurarries and this resuts in beautiful new nature reserves. Sources: https://knauf.nl/gips https://www.highlandinteriorfinishes.ca/eco-friendly-plaster/
Giving it a more ground texture
I then just covered the sawdust/dextrin pieces with the plaster so that it became more one whole.
I then painted this piece only on the flat., horizontal surfaces with my cinnamon paint.
The vertical surfaces I painted with the soil/dirt paint and the coffee paint.
I then added some stones and grass that I found on the end of my street to make it more nature looking.
Finished result
I made a couple of other ones, and basically did it in the same way.
Reflection
I'm pretty satisfied how the landscape turned out. I do feel like I need a lot more scenery and different kinds of scenery, so not only hills but maybe also some woods, a river etc. But I think that is a nice opportunity to try out different bioplastic recepies.
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