Silicone Casting

Fabricated with Akshita

For our custom silicone casting assignment, we wanted to explore the behaviors of soft silicone when casted in different molds. For example, we will play around with varying thinness or holes. For our subject, we chose to depict a butterfly as the wings allow us four unique experiments and the wings themselves are mostly 2D. We also received inspiration from the crinkling inflatables experiment and wanted to see if it produced similar results with silicone.

To make things more interesting, I bought dichroic film so that I could laser cut them and place it within the silicone. I was interested in how the dichroic film will react when the silicone moves. However, I put off using this material as the silicone was more translucent and would not show when it is inside the material. I want to further explore this project further into my final project and find a way to incorporate dichroic film. Possible using clear silicone?

Using Adobe Illustrator, we visualized how our butterfly mold will look like. I traced a butterfly picture to create an outline started our design from there. To quickly ideate we decided to use 5mm wood and a laser cutter to build up our mold through layers and use wood glue to piece everything together.

Thin Layers: The circles will be thinner (10mm thin) than the rest of the wing (15mm).

Thinner Layers: The circles will be even thinner (5mm thinner) than the rest of the wing (15mm).

Holes: The circles will be holes, there will be no silicone here.

Opposite: The entire wing will be thinner (10mm) than the circles (15mm).

Lessons-Learned:

We realized that after making our mold, we did not create a pathway for air. This is a huge mistake that we were so surprised when we realized what we did (or did not do).