"Crevasse" #6

This morning I first took the immersion blender to make the paper mass more pulpy. It worked like a dream, of course. I added two hands of flour and two hands of gypsum, after mixing that, I added a considerable amount of white glue. A nice mouldable mass was the result. Here and there you could still see some paper but that's not much of a problem.

So, I had this 80% paper / 20% water and cohesive stuff mass and for a second I wondered whether I would have enough. Well, I had. More than enough.

The chef at work.

Not exactly foie gras but perfect stuff for diorama building!

It already looks nice but it's still a bit too cubist for my taste.

The inner scaffolding of the diorama structure was covered with 80 gram paper sheet and after that was dry to handle I started adding pulp to the top layer. It did not stick well to the underlying structure but because of its fibrous qualities it clung together quite well. So it was more or less a case of taking a small scoop of pulp and gently spreading it over the surface by pushing it outward and sideways. The edges had some rougher edges so there the pulp found it easier to cling to the structure.

After I did the top layer I did the crevasse itself. Starting at the top, the mass held on to itself and the top layer and let me do the rest quite easily. When both sides were done I had a brainwave and cranked up the hot-air oven I have. I thought for just letting it dry 80ºC might do the trick. It worked fine. I took it out after some 20 minutes and the stuff was dry enough to start with the outer side walls. I set the oven at 100ºC and put it in for 30 minutes.

Another good addition to my paper modeling tools! Also very good for pies, gratin and other edible stuff.

In the meantime I still had a lot of other pulp so I thought up some "next projects", took some picture frames and started moulding some more landscapes for future models. In the future you might see some of them back on this very place. The last glob of pulp, a big handful, was all put in a small triangular base frame as an experiment. How long will this mountain of pulp take to dry? Of course I don't know yet what to make of it but it might come in handy one day...

So far for now!