production

I used garden wire to make the base of the mushrooms. Chicken wire was to rigid and didn’t give the free motion that i wanted so I opted for this. I wrapped the wire around cylinder options like bottles so that it came of like a spring. keeping the centre at that width i made one end small and the other larger so that i had a base and tip for the mushroom cap to sit on. I wanted it to slant and this was naturally achieved by i couldn’t make the wire the same length equally so it just naturally made it bend one way.

After the process of making the base out of wire i then added the plaster of paris to it. I had to do it one half at a time and allow it to dry. once one coat was done it was easy to keep applying over the top to give it a certain sturdy thickness.

Once the plaster was dry i applied acrylic paint. The acrylic seemed to be better than using spray paint, I have learnt this from previous projects.

i also painted white spots on to give it the cartoon magic mushroom look. I done this because of the vibrant colours that the acrylic gave off. You can also see here the the cap of the mushroom is placed over the base. I’m glad it managed to stay up.

I cut holes in the bottom of the mushrooms so that they could just slip onto the base and also because the cap was hollow it was able to hold the batteries and lights within and would be very easy to change over if the batteries ran out. You can see me here trying to push seperate led lights through holes in the sides. I used a wooden skewer to push holes through the plaster and with a lot of time and frustration i pushed each individual light through the holes and superglued them into place. Some of the lights weren’t working by the end but Damien managed to find the problem and solder them back togther for me.

As you can see in the birds-eye picture above there are a few lights that didn’t decide to work, but from the gist of things it was looking good and i was pleased with the results. Would have been good if they lasted for more than 20 minutes at a time.

This is the first layer of plaster going over the top part of the large mushroom. There was a lot of excess hanging off the edges but once dried they were just easily bent underneath and when the plaster was then applied to the bottom it was just stuck down. i had to apply a lot of thick layers to this so that when it rested on the base it didnt just push trhough and buckle the top.

From hanging out of my bathroom window i took this picture to show a higher angle of the finished plastering. it was drying here and i just wanted to paint it. I applied around 5 layers of plaster to both base and cap, this meant alot drying was needed before any paint could be applied.

Here is most of the top painted red. I wish i had a larger brush but beacuse of the texture of the plaster i needed a fine brush to push the bristles through the holes otherewise there would have still been a lot of white showing.

Finished and ready for some lights to be added.

i measuered out the diameter of the tumblers and cut holes in the top of the cap to insert them. I didn’t want to do to many otherwise the frame would have buckled upwards when the base went inside. I used the wire cutters becuase there was a lot of wire, it become a bit tricky.

I painted the inside of the cups white so that you couldn’t see inside, this picturesa bit dark to really tell but it didn’t look to good when you could see all the wire and excess plaster hanging about through the cups. i also painted white rings around the edges so they looked like the white spots on the magic mushrooms.

This is the final outcome. I was pleased with what i had achieved. With more money i would have liked to produced more but am very happy with the outcome of the instillation.

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