Sculpture time with M-seal!

As I begin to write this, I can see my M-seal creation winking at me. The online resource said M-seal dries in an hour but this blob defied all laws of epoxy resin and dried up in 40 minutes. The 20 minutes denied to me were the most tormenting 20 minutes of my life. It would have been an ideal drying time had I used it for concealing leakages. But I was moulding it into a mother-child shape! Here it is for your grand wonderment, my first M-seal assignment and also hopefully my most amatuerish!

When you buy M-seal from the hardware shop, you will get two oblong rectangles of a soft moldable substance packed separately. It is basically epoxy resin and I am not its friend yet. You can learn more on the internet like I did but remember it dries up within 40 minutes. One is dark gray and the other is pale olive green, but when you mix the two, the mixture starts getting a darker tone and eventually turns into a warm black mass.

While you are kneading the two blobs, you have to be quick with your design judgement. As soon as the dough turns black, it also turns very soft and malleable. Begin moulding right away if you intend to make a one-piece structure. But if you want to create seperate little design elements to be then joined together or stuck/hung/beaded into something, then I would suggest to mix only that much as is required. 

My orignially intended sculpture was very different from what has shaped up but I'm happy I ended up wiser on this learning curve. In half an hour, I had managed to knead that black blob and create the required shape. Just then I got worried my sculpture won't stand without a tough base. So I created a flat cylindrical base and tried to attach it with a metal nail to the main body. The nail got stuck midway through the body since it had solidified at the core by then. I gave up pushing further and decided to pull out the nail. But the base had solidified by then. The next 10 most precious minutes were spent in pulling the nail out and patching up the hole it had created.

That was about it. My M-seal project came to an end as I struggled to give it a smoother finishing. The mother-child formation, very obstinately to my liking, chose their shape and stuck to it. No matter how much I pushed or carved, it didn't change a square millimeter. Perhaps I have to start being friends with this epoxy resin creature, to really get a hang of its likes and dislikes and get myself thoroughly acquainted with its mood swings if I were to ever create an awesome shape with it.