After my ground breaker was stolen, I wanted to see how I would do creating a new ground breaker almost entirely out of Great Stuff. In the past I had pretty good success casting skull head from Blucky’s out of sand mix cement. It is tricky because you have to slit the skull and tape it back in order to release the concrete. Well I have a blucky skull which has mostly disintegrated due to the Sun so I tried to use it as a mold. First mistake, using too much release agent. When working with cement mix you can slather on the release agent without too much concern, I use ATF. Well with Great Stuff you can’t. I sprayed the skull with ‘pam’ and that was a mistake. The oil in pam keeps the great stuff from setting up property. Luckily for me, this skull was falling apart, had a lot of cracks and holes so this is how the skull finally set up lots of leakage through the one eye hole:

Skull
Trying to use great stuff in a mold is not a great idea. It doesn’t mold well due to it’s weightlessness, it doesn’t really settle. As this skull was already disintegrating, I totally destroyed it trying to release the end product. But at least it kept the basic properties of the skull. I tried two other molds, one a rubber mask and the other a paper mache mold and they both came out looking like globs. Great stuff doesn’t like being molded in unventilated plastic or rubber. I wonder how it would have set up if I had drilled small holes throughout….save that thought for next time.

I retrieved an old piece of pink stuff that my son has used as a knife throwing board…I wanted to kill him…but kept the piece ‘in case I ever needed it’ you know what I mean. I used a store bought grave breaker for size and free handed a basic shape for a body.
Back of ribs
Then I free handed the great stuff applying it like you would icing on a cake. In the middle I made a bump then swung out of each side coming down the sides of the pink stuff ever so slightly.
Front of Ribs

I started freehanding bones on top of black plastic and got carried away…I forgot how much this stuff would expand and the bones and the hands came out thicker than I wanted. But hey, it’s my first go round and as the first one got stolen, I am going to run with what I got:
Pieces laid out

So I put her together with pieces left over of floral stem wires ( I had made skeleton hands using the masking tape method, if you use floral stems you don’t have to tape the wires together, just remove excess ‘fingers’) I used untwisted hemp rope for her hair and scraps of torn muslin to make her clothes. I didn’t age anything because I figured the Houston weather would do that for me. As she sits in the sun the unpainted parts of the great stuff will eventually turn a disgusting orangey color, you can see it is already turning in spots.
Here she is Aging nicely

I glued a piece of scrap wood on the back and screwed in one of those u shaped conduit fasteners so I could stake her into the ground. If I do this again, I will go faster with the GS and make my initial ‘lines’ thinner, for more realistic looking bones. This project used up a whole can, but I did waste some with my mold experimenting. Thank you for visiting.