Sealing WED clay - technique and UK supplies query

Hi all,

I've lurked for a while and always managed to find answers to my queries on here, but I've not been able to find much on this subject. Apologies if it's already been answered somewhere.

I'm interested in getting some WED clay to make sculpts for masks, and I've seen people use Krylon Crystal Clear spray to seal the stuff before making a mould. Unfortunately even a tiny bottle of Krylon seems to be around £30 here in the UK. Has anyone found a cheaper alternative?

I also wondered if WED is reusable once the mould's been made? I assume people are spraying it while it's still damp/leather-hard-skinned, otherwise I have no idea how they're then extracting it from plaster moulds! So - after pulling the sculpt from the new mould - can you clean off the sealer and reconstitute the bits of WED that have dried, or do you have to buy a new batch of WED each time?

My experience so far is:
1. Sculpting in normal pottery clay (great for roughing out big shapes then refining) and making a mould in plaster from it while the clay's still wet (and therefore reusable once scraped out of the mould).
2. Sculpting in monsterclay (great for detail work, but a right pain for getting larger smooth surfaces, especially when the house is freezing...) and making a mould in silicone.

With the WED I hope to be able to get that fast, roughing out-ness that I love about pottery clay, but then cast in silicone and still be able to reuse the clay afterwards. Am I just wishing for a magical solution that doesn't really exist?

Hope you can help!

Rachel

i would think any spray can clear sealer would work. check your spray paint can section and see if they have a clear coat. test it out and see if that works. i use any clear coat i have when sealing a wed clay before molding and this is with stone molds, silicone molds and fiberglass molds. . hell i have used red spray paint before, glossy though.

As Mr. Bungle said, whatever clear spray paint is available at your hardware store will do. shellac is also popular (the amber type). Remember that the clear is just a sealer, not a release. Not a big deal if you're doing a silicone mold, but you'll definitely want a release agent on top of that for anything else.

You can reconstitute WED, but it will never be quite the same. Professionally, it goes straight in the trash once it's out of the mold, but you can certainly get more use out of it if you're so inclined.
You're never letting it dry out all the way in the sculpture. A leathery skin, as you said. If it totally dries up, it's liable to crack and such.

Hi, in the U.K. you can get WED from a couple of places Niell's materials is where we last got it but they do another grey clay that I also commonly use especially to bulk out, hardly anything in the quality but substantially cheaper in the long run.
Air your sculpture off, enough so that the surface is dry, you can rush this with a hair dryer if you're impatient like I am. I'll use as the guys say above - a gloss lacquer for a gloss finish or a Matt primer for a Matt finish to seal it, warning varying factors may allow the paint to stick to the mould so best to use a quality spray release to cut down that risk.
You can re-use the clay if you get the whole process over quickly but after you've scraped the surface off, re-hydrated it a bit, it's usually not worth the effort. Better off using that time and energy in getting the armature well made and filled out and just try to use less clay.
Don't get me wrong you can grind it up when it 100% dried as dust, wet it up and start all over if you really wanted to but it's never quite as smooth or clean, my experience is use as little as you can and bin it afterwards.
Oh, also Halfords has a good standard of paint aerosols, you can get the 750ml cans of clear lacquer that are throughly tried and tested think they're about £7-8

As others have stated, any crystal clear would work, but I have also used shellac as a sealer too, that worked really well. Im not sure you guys have that in the UK, but we can get it at any home improvement store for really cheap. But yeah, WED goes in the trash after Im done with it. Its just not worth it honestly. I can get 50 lbs for 13 bucks!

Thank you all so much for the info! I'll be trying to source some to try it out.

I'm keen to be able to reuse it as it's way more expensive here. I'd love to be able to find it in a standard home improvement store! :-D
Here are all the current suppliers with prices that I could find, all including UK delivery cost:

£25.60 for 25lb - South Western Industrial Plasters
£27.72 for 25lb – Fred Aldous
£31.89 for 25lb - Scarva
£33.70 for 24lb – 4D Model Shop
£34.20 for 24lb – Neill’s Materials
£45 for 25lb – Tomps
£141 for 171lb … Mouldlife (seems they won’t deliver orders less than £100!)