Plasticine

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Not to be confused with the Pleistocene epoch which is part of the geologic timescale.

Plasticine is a putty-like modelling material made from calcium salts, petroleum jelly and aliphatic acids. The name is trademarked but tends to be used as a generic description in Britain and the Commonwealth. In the United States the term modelling clay is much more widely used and, although the Plasticine brand is available, it is not well known.

Plasticine was formulated by art teacher William Harbutt of Bathampton, near Bath, England in 1897. He wanted a non-drying clay for use by his sculpture students. Although the exact composition is a secret, Plasticine is composed of calcium salts (principally calcium carbonate, i.e. chalk), petroleum jelly, and long-chain aliphatic acids (principally stearic acid). It is non-toxic, sterile, soft, malleable, and does not dry on exposure to air (unlike superficially similar products such as Play-Doh, which is based on flour, salt and water). It cannot be hardened by firing - in fact, it is flammable and attempts to harden it by heating may be dangerous.

A patent was awarded in 1899, and in 1900 commercial production started at a factory in Bathampton. The original Plasticine was grey, but the product initially sold to the public came in four colours. It was soon available in a wide variety of bright colours. Plasticine was popular with children, widely used in schools for teaching art, and found a wide variety of other uses (moulding for plaster casts, for example). The Harbutt company promoted Plasticine as a children's toy by producing modelling kits in association with companies responsible for popular children's characters such as Noddy, the Mr Men and Paddington Bear.

The original Plasticine factory was destroyed by fire in 1963 and replaced by a modern building. The Harbutt company continued to produce Plasticine in Bathampton until 1983. It is still manufactured today, but in smaller quantities, and is marketed once more as an art material.

Plasticine is used in animation, one of its main exponents being Nick Park who used characters modelled in Plasticine to win Oscars for his short films The Wrong Trousers (1992) and A Close Shave (1995). This technique is known as claymation, and is a form of stop motion animation. Plasticine is appealing to animators because it can be used with ease: It is moldable enough to create a character, flexible enough to allow that character to move in many ways, and dense enough that it can retain its shape easily when combined with a wire armature. (See article on claymation for information about why this is necessary.) A computer game with the graphics and textures based on photos of plasticine models is Dark Oberon.

Plasticine is also used in party games such as Cranium, Rapidough and Barbarossa.

A similar product, "Kunst-Modellierton" (known as Plastilin), was invented by Franz Kolb of Munich, Germany in 1880. This product is still available, known as "Münchner Künstler Plastilin" (Munich artists' plasticine).