Description
- Great clay molding material which is re-usable, so you can keep using it for different mold shapes.
- Perfect if you need to make lots of clay molds but only need to use each to create few copies. Picks up detail surprisingly well.
- 1 box 6 pcs single color (5/8 x 1/4 x 2 1/4 inches per piece).
To Make a Mould
Put Oyumaru in hot water until it melts, take it out with a fork (or chopsticks for fun), then shape it in your hands. The package says to use 80°C (176°F) water, but I found that it cools down pretty rapidly and so I didn’t have any trouble just using hot water from a kettle. If it’s okay to make tea or coffee with, it is the right temperature to melt Oyumaru. But of course – be careful and don’t put it in your mouth. (As the label so helpfully tells you, in Japanese!)
Oyumaru comes in bars about ¼” (4mm) thick, and you can cut them with scissors if you need less than a full bar. Put the Oyumaru into hot water and wait a few minutes for it to soften. It will become slightly more transparent as it melts. It will not lose its shape, however. Soon it will be soft and malleable. Remove from the water and begin to shape with your hands. It will become stiffer as it cools and you might need to put it back into the hot water to get it soft enough to shape.
The water doesn’t affect the plastic. But water might damage the item that you want to mold. If so, blot the excess water. But do it quickly as the Oyumaru will get stiff quickly. Melted Oyumaru is not sticky and does not leave a residue on your hands. Now press your piece into the warm material and hold for a few minutes until the plastic cools and holds its shape. Once it’s sufficiently cool, the mold is ready to be used to make castings. If you’re in a hurry (and your item is waterproof), you can dunk it into ice water to cool it faster.
Durability
Once you make a mold or texture with Oyumaru, you can keep it indefinitely. It doesn’t give off any residue, dry out, or melt at normal room temperatures. Once you’re done with it, though, you can just pop it back into the hot water to melt it down again and make something else. This means that Oyumaru is a perfect reusable mold material for when you want to make only a few items and don’t want to keep the mold permanently.
Because Oyumaru melts in hot water, however, you can’t bake polymer clay items in the mold. You also want to keep Oyumaru molds away from hot areas such as attics and cars in summer.
Skills Involved
Of course, there is skill involved with making molds, so your results will likely be better with a little practice. But it’s an easy process, and you’ll get the hang of it quickly. There is no waste, so you can just melt it and re-do your mold if it’s not the way you like. But in general, Oyumaru makes molds with excellent detail. If you are making molds for resin, Oyumaru produces better castings than silicone putty molds. For polymer clay push molds, the details in the Oyumaru mold are good, and the polymer will readily take the design’s crisp lines well. But the drawback is that it can be hard to remove the clay without making it twist and distort.