This is the mushroom that led me to start casting mushrooms. I had seen a similar mushroom a few days before and thought "hey, that's like one of those Super Mario Mushrooms," because it had the specs all over it. A few days later I saw this one and thought about how I could cast it. I had some plaster around, but really no experience with this type of casting. I figured I would just cast it in plaster and then later figure out how to get the mushroom out and the molten metal in. As you can see in the casting video, I was a bit sloppy with the plaster and the molten zinc. After the first cast attempt with zinc, I used epoxy to piece the plaster pieces back together and then cast it again with aluminum. I probably wouldn't have bothered to piece it back together but there were no other mushrooms around at the time and I wanted to try it again. I had no idea that it would turn out so awesome.

*The reason the finished cast doesn't look exactly the same is that the mushroom cap was expanding as I was setting up. Also the hole in the cap turned into a big split by the time I cast it in plaster.

*I cast this one in plaster first. Then I cast a few other smaller mushrooms so that I had some test subjects. On the night that I cast this on, I first tried it on this mushroom. That cast turned out great so I went ahead with this one. I wanted to be sure to get a good cast because this was such a cool looking mushroom.