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Making a Reusable Mould Material out of Gelatine

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This tutorial should give you a quick demonstration of how to make a gelatine moulding material. Gelatine is versatile and is excellent for doing small runs of low-detail parts. Once you are done casting that part, just melt the gelatine in the microwave and reuse it! It is extremely cheap to make with gelatine costing about 69p a box, glycerine at about £1.30 and a couple of spoonfuls of honey (depending on how much gelatine you need).

It can be used a cheap alternative to silicone, latex or plaster moulds.

It is marketed by various SFX shops, as far as I can tell by the videos, it is essentially identical to "ComposiMold" but it won't cost you £50 a litre. To see more of what you can do with gelatine moulds you should watch their video: [link] There are other videos via that link that show you how to use it to cast urethane, chocolate, concrete etc, whether or not you want to pay for ComposiMold is up to you, but I'm Scottish, notorious for pennypinching, and I resent paying that sort of money for something I can make in my kitchen.

I used about 10 sachets of gelatine for this tutorial, that's approx 60g. You need to make sure you buy the powdered stuff, not sheet gelatine. Glycerine is available in all pharmacies.

BE VERY CAREFUL WORKING WITH HOT GELATINE! It is essentially melted sugar and will stick to and burn through your hand if it is hot enough! Use common sense and extreme caution.

Speaking of common sense, when this is melted it is hot, so if anything you are pouring it on melts with moderate heat then it won't survive the moulding process! Equally if you are pouring polyurethane resins or plaster into a gelatine mould the heat those materials give out when they cure will melt the mould and create a huge sticky mess. If you want to cast in resin or plaster make sure you put the entire mould into the freezer while it cures.

This is a paraphrased and slightly rewritten version of this tutorial by Marshon on Instructables. His technique of microwaving it didn't work for me, so I use a saucepan and put the gelatine in hot sugary water instead. I also focus entirely on moulding here and not prosthetics - although gelatine can be used to make awesome prosthetics! I used gelatine to do an entire cast for a zombie film once, you can see the pics here.

Any questions? Go ahead :)
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DreamCrystalArt's avatar
Will the mold eventually go bad if you let it sit too long? I'm thinking about using it for resin casting xD Once used for resin can you still reuse the Gelatin for other resin casting molds (I'm sure once it's used for resin it's no good for food grade molding)?