The first is a print. The second is a wax mold of the print. The third is a mostlyzinc cast of the wax mold.

"Of what" is something I'm being coy about. This is basically a self-directed capstone/thesis project and the reveal will either be impressive or an outright catastrophe. For example, you can't see that the blue and silver ones are abject garbage because I (sigh) followed someone's advice and coated the clear one with mod podge before casting it in RTV, and the mod podge retarded the cure such that three goddamn days later the place where it was thickest (top of the top flats on the pillar) it was still toothpaste-ey when I cut the mold off so most of my flats are okay but some of them look like raisins. You can plainly see the cast spalled when I poured it at 1:15 and threw it in the kiln at 5:15; you can't see all the flash I had to cut off of it because bringing something to 400 then 1000 then 1350 degrees f when it was literally liquid 8 hours before is tough on cheap crappy Ransom & Randolph investment. I knew these casts would be garbage when I cut the mold but I also knew that an expert is someone who has made every mistake there is to make in a narrow field and if there's one thing I've been doing for the past nine months, it's build expertise. This is my third attempt at the frickin' mold, when before I started listening to people I had 100% success 100% of the time.

The clear one took about six hours to design after spending three or four days thinking about it. It then took 12 hours to print.

The blue one took about two hours to mold and then a 3-day wait to not be enough to work.

The silver one took 18 hours of waiting, and about 10 minutes of excitement with molten metal. Then about 20 minutes of cleanup.

All told it takes about $300 worth of gear to make the clear one (not including the computer). The blue one takes another $1800 worth of gear. The silver one is about $500 on top of that. The urethane mold is about $15 worth of goop but it's reusable. The investment is like $6. Actual metal is fractional dollars.

Small-scale casting is effectively a lost art. Nobody does it. There's nobody to listen to. I lucked into knowing a guy who is probably one of the top dozen people in the world but what I'm doing is so far outside his expertise that generally he's making educated guesses.