Les Bonnes Choses

In case you're parachuting into the story and want to be able to easily jump through the narrative, here are links to the rest of my tale:
Prologue
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

The prototype pieces were what the molds were going to replicate, so it stood to reason that I should spend some time trying to get them right, right? Between last summer and January, I made several versions of the same tiles out of Sculpey modeling clay. The stuff has the familiar texture of plasticine, out of which I made many, many dinosaurs in first and second grade. It doesn't dry out, and when you're satisfied with your creation, you bake it for a few minutes to harden it. I tried a number of approaches, including hexagonal cookie cutters (only an approximately regular hexagon, it seems) and sculpting the tile features before baking it. In the end, what seemed to work best was to just bake flat hexagons and get some use out of my Dremel tool.

Using the cookie cutters and a rolling pin, I rolled out three hexagons, baked them, inscribed a regular hexagon from a template that I had created in Adobe Illustrator, and then trimmed the edges so I had 3 (more or less) perfect hexagons to work with. I then inscribed a smaller hexagon which was to mark the edges of the area I would excavate from each hex to create the tile features.



Here's how the first of my prototypes turned out, along with the dremel bits I used to sculpt it.



Incidentally, I learned that organic shapes are criminally easy to sculpt. I should have anticipated that based on my exposure to Bob Ross' landscape painting program on PBS.

What? Who's Bob Ross?



Yeah, that's Bob Ross.