A 1920’s bather, complete with removable towel and stylish cap, which incidentally were the two hardest parts of this job. As part of a project to restore Cleethorpes Lido to its former glory a statue was commissioned that had to mimic an original poster from the early 20th century. The process was very much the same as the last full body cast but with the exception of clothes being added to the equation, which had to be moisturised excessively to avoid the alginate sticking to them, and was a lot more confident approaching this.. I wasn't expecting the model however, who had gone out for ‘few drinks’ the night before, to fall out of the mould half way through the process. Splitting the alginate and almost ruining the mould so that copious amounts of super glue had to be applied in order to save the mould.

The difficult part was creating the towel, it had to look like fabric but also be removable in order to be painted later on. We decided on using a real towel first and once in place coated it with resin to harden it, it stayed worryingly damp with resin a lot longer than expected but eventually dried and hardened leaving a sturdy towel. I then applied large amounts of car body filler across the surface and sanded smooth.