The master mold for Oliver is done. The rubber original had not yet been poured when this picture was taken, but it is now curing in the mold. It will take a day before I know if the casting is good, but since he is at a stopping point I decided it was time to tackle his mother.
The first step for Elsie was going to be removing her tail. I am still on the fence about whether or not I'll need to lop off her head (more on that in a future post), but there is no way that tail can stay where it is. If an undercut is an area on the original that overhangs and obscures another area, then her tail is the mother of all undercuts! As can be seen in the picture above, the entire tail loops back around and sits in front of the rest of the tail.
And to make her even more interesting, there is another undercut area behind the fringed edge near the dock on this side. She has lovely tailbone detailing under there, so it needs to be preserved. The logical thing to do is cut the tail off where it meets the body. I have already drawn the cut line in the top picture.
I hate cutting, and hate cutting resin most of all. It's really hard to get a clean cut, even with a jeweler's saw (which will be necessary to avoid cutting the other part of her tail along with the rest). In this case, however, cutting the resin is the lesser of two evils because cutting the rubber master would mean I'd have to find a way to get the tail to fill properly with rubber. If there is something I dislike more than sawing on resin, it's fiddling around with complicated rubber pours!
So tonight I'll do a little tail docking. Once that's done, I have to start making some decisions about how I think the rest of her will work.
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