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Revision as of 22:44, 2 March 2009 by Amazincredible (talk | contribs) (Undid revision 274547529 by 78.146.22.17 (talk))(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Plasticine, a brand of modelling clay, is a putty-like modelling material made from calcium salts, petroleum jelly and aliphatic acids. The name is a registered trademark of Flair Leisure Products plc but has come to be genericized in the United Kingdom,the Commonwealth and Ireland.
History
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), 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; it melts when exposed to heat, and is flammable at much higher temperatures.
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 currently made in Thailand.
From 1983 to 2006, the brand went through a number of ownership changes and was off the market for a long time. Plasticine was owned by Bluebird Toys plc following its acquisition of Harbutt's parent company, Peter Pan. Then, following Bluebird's takeover by Mattel in 1998, the brand was sold on to Humbrol Ltd, famous for its Airfix kits and model paints. In 2005, Flair Leisure licensed the brand from Humbrol and relaunched Plasticine. A year later, when Humbrol went into administration, Flair bought the Plasticine brand outright.
Uses
Plasticine is often used in animation. One of its main proponents is Aardman Animation's Nick Park, who used characters modeled in Plasticine in his Oscar-winning short films A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1992) and A Close Shave (1995), as well as the feature film Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. This technique is popularly known as claymation in the US, 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.
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).
Similarly, in Italy, the product Pongo is also marketed as "plastilina" and shares the main attributes of Plasticine. Pongo is produced and marketed by the Italian company FILA. There is a wikipedia page, in Italian, for Pongo. Examples of works produced in Pongo can be seen on the Pongomania blog.