What Is The Best Armature To Use?
We have found that Aluminium Foil is hands-down the best armature, or 'core' for nearly any sized creation.
This purely serves to support your creation until it 'self-strengthens' enough to fully support itself.
Foil can be sculpted with genuine grace and sophistication using simply hot glue as a binder. By crumpling tinfoil lightly, nearly any shape can be achieved. By compressing the surface, it becomes remarkably strong and even temporarily weight-bearing.
Pal Tiya Premium and tinfoil work in two ways. The Aluminium Foil eventually deteriorates, eventually oxidizing into harmless Alumina dust within the hollow cavity it leaves inside your sculpture. This leaves space enough for any steel in there to also rust away over the centuries.
Generally a Pal Tiya Premium based sculpture should not really depend on this steel for support after it has cured, when properly planned. The steel could pretty much go away entirely over time and not affect the fiber reinforced coating. Pal Tiya Premium has also been formulated to stay pretty much impervious to moisture & water penetration after it has been correctly cured.
We at Pal Tiya wish to be environmentally conscious. We chose Aluminum foil as our core material for this reason. After Silicon, Aluminium is also the most abundant element found naturally in the Earth's crust - at more than 8 percent by weight. Aluminium foil is less than 0.0006 of an inch thick. When in contact or encased in PTP, the breakdown of Aluminum foil is accelerated to months and sometimes just days.
The thinness of the foil allows the naturally alkaline environment of curing PTP to attack the foil turning it into a crumbly mass not unlike half of the Avengers at the end of Infinity War. A standard pop can is 10 times thicker, but more importantly, coated with plastic inside and out, and this plastic prevents natural breakdown. We all know that plastics can take ten to fifty times as long to decompose than Aluminum.
In a nutshell, Aluminium foil 'begins' breakdown within days of being in contact with PTP. Most of the foil breaks down to a 'crumbly mass' in the space of a month or two. Drifting 'loose' pieces of Al. foil break down faster. Crumpled foil 'lumps' can take a little longer.
It should be noted that in a landfill, ordinary newspaper can last centuries, because there is so little contact with air. In that same environment, a popcan could also last centuries. Plastics, however, can last considerably longer.
Complex forms can be also be made with combinations of cardboard, tape, plywood, chicken wire, steel, etc, and then covered with tinfoil for the final shaping. This allows you to use a minimum 'shell' of Pal Tiya Premium to cover and finish your creation for the outdoors. Remember, that this 'armature' needs only be strong and stable enough to support all of your mix as you sculpt it.
We have a comprehensive video on Armatures for all sculptures, including overhead/height bigger pieces here
We have a shorter one here