Saturday 2 August 2014

Artificial dry stone wall.

Following an enquiry for the top section of a dry stone wall I was all of a quarry, sorry, quandary.   The obvious method is to build a small section with real stone and mould from that.   I usually use latex to mould with as it is very economical.   The thing is, latex takes a while to dry and several layers must be built up to get the required thickness.   The Cassini's plaster I use to make the finished article also takes up to a week to cure fully.   With a vacation looming I was stuck between a rock and a hard place.   Pun number two.

I decided to get the mould prepared by a mould maker.   Transporting a dry stone wall in real stone posed a bit of a problem.   You can't easily lift a complete dry stone wall, not even the top section.   I could have built the wall on a pallet but had this been handled roughly, my short section of wall may have crumbled.

I decided, therefore, to make a section of wall from scratch.   Using a box section as a base I used plaster to make the basic shape of the dry stone wall and then added cracks, notches and general rocky features by hand.   Here is the result:


Artificial dry stone wall




I haven't painted it as yet as it's still wet but I have converted the image above to greyscale, added some colour, added more of the lower wall and dropped the wall in to a farmer's field.   Digitally as opposed to literally, that is!  Aye, that'll do.



Artificial dry stone wall.   Digitally enhanced image.


artificialrocks.co.uk



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