Smiling Stop Motion Gods: More Gel Water Experiments

(Please note: when you receive your water gel sample, please use standard safety measures and do not heat it or eat it. I don't wear gloves with it myself but I do wash my hands before I eat just in case. There's no labeling whatsoever, no ingredients listed, it's made in China, use at your own risk. Thank you.)

Packages of gel water samples* are being readied to mail out tomorrow. Let me know if you'd like some, if you haven't already. I've got enough to share. *Some have asked about a trade/pay back. You know what mama want. FISH!!! for the underwater scene. (See details in sidebar>>>>scroll down a bit.)

Some new findings about the material today:

The gel water tints beautifully as long as you use a transparent dye. I used a drop or two from an old bottle of Marshall's photo color to get this watery aqua blue, but one could easily choose red for wine instead, etc.

I added a several sizes of holeless glass beads to the tinted sample to see if boiling water bubbles could be animated. They can. I also found that organic air bubbles can be easily pressed out, if in the way. Gel water can be as crystal clear or as bubbly as one could wish.

I found that the gel can be sculpted with a push mold technique. Here you see a blob after being easily removed (!) from the Ultracal mold of Kyra, the mermaid's sculpt! If you ever wanted to have a face appear in (by reversing the slump/fade away) or disappear into a body of water, this is your stuff. I was wondering how I could get a face to appear for a moment on the surface of water in Rana's water barrel! If one wanted a little life in the water face, there's a little time to move the mouth or eyes as the impression slowly fades away.

It also makes stable controllable stop motion tears, seen here on the sculpt for Rana, the goat woman. Much easier to animate than glycerine I imagine and will leave no trace on your puppet unless you want to paint one in water.

I experimented with chilling the gel water to see if it being cool made it more firm and it does. It might be useful to have a can of freezing spray on hand to cool the material if animating thin streams you want to hold for more than a frame or two. I also tried freezing the material all the way in the freezer with surprising results.

It becomes rock hard and also changes the opacity to something like the frost of beach glass as it thaws back out. The consistency also changes after fully thawing out again. It no longer sculpts/blends, becoming firmer and more rubbery instead. I'm suggesting that if one were to push the room temp gel into a sturdy push mold, freeze it hard in the mold, then demold and let return to room temp, you'd have a semi-transparent stable prop in any color you'd want--oh yeah--that BOUNCES!

UPDATE: Here's who got GW samples mailed out to them today (Friday):

1 Nick H - Australia
2 Mike B - Illinois
3 Rich J - Canada
4 Emmy B - Canada
5 DJ D - Canada
6 John H - Hawaii
7 Jeffery R - Louisiana
8 Yuji K - California
9 Mike LaT - Wisconsin
10 Jessica K - Germany
11 Stephanie D - Canada (unasked, but I wanted to)

Here's who has packets ready but on hold until...:

12 Yaz S-A - Turkey (waiting until she's home)
13 Sven B - Oregon (unasked, but I'm going to anyway)
14 Brian P - ? (waiting for an address - email me Prosser!)
15 Katie - Somewhere in Australia (waiting for an address - email me Katie!)

Anyone else like some?

Thanks so much to everyone for the incredible fish they've already made for Halfland and for those working on making one now! These are the most wonderful marvelous things and will make the underwater scene a total RIOT! Can you imagine all the great critters doing their thing under the water?! I'm hoping to crowd the little ocean floor set with all your creativity!! So great.