Yesterday i and Christina Lewis held a concrete casting at Bitraf.
The workshop was meant to be a collective tryout of concrete as material for both art and technology.
We used a thin, low viscosity concrete, intended for use as garage floors.
We did two rounds of castings, in the second round, we added colour in the concrete. The color was a challenge in it self, as adding any substance to the concrete, alters its properties. The one i ended up using, is a pigment in powder form, normaly used for painting chalk walls
For the big candle holder shown at the intro, i milled a mold from building insulation using a 10mm milling bit for removing the bulk of the material, then finishing it up with the 6mm long ball nose.
For the small project that we did over the weekend, using a drill mounted spiral mixer in a bucket where sufficient. For the molds, we used the already mentioned machined foam block, as well as cut bottles, coke cans, crumbled paper cups, and 3d printed molds.
The 3D printed molds where especially interesting, as the low viscosity concrete capture every minute details from the print.
More results from the workshop:
If you want to try this out yourself, have a lookout for the next workshop at Bitraf's meetup.