Category:Newplast

2019: Newplast Pack 23, "Rainbow" [image info]

2019: Newplast Pack 25, "Multicultural" [image info]

The Newplast modelling material (by Newclay Products, NCP) is essentially a third-party Plasticine-substitute aimed at professional and semi-professional modellers.

Product justification

Newplast is aimed at students and professionals doing "claymation"-style stop-motion clay-based animation, which has undergone something of a boom since the success of Nick Park's "Wallace and Gromit" series of animated films. Although we're not aware of any specific formulation improvements over Plasticine, and Plasticine was originally designed primarily as a serious modelling material, Plasticine tends nowadays to be marketed at the parents of young children.

Someone doing stop-motion animation may want to buy a large quantity of a particular colour, or get a top-up batch a year or so later and feel reassured that they will be able to buy more of the original colour and have it match exactly. While Plasticine is available in single-colour slabs, some serious users probably felt that they'd rather buy from a company that was more focused on the needs of the modelling professional, and could sell multi-kilo batches, or supply custom quantities, or custom assortments – Newclay sell 10-kilo buckets containing a user-selected assortment of up to 20 different colours.

It may also be that some modelling professionals cringe at the idea of buying their raw materials in packs with brightly-coloured "Kiddie" graphics, and feel much happier buying packs in plainer wrappers, from a proper craft shop that understands the importance of keeping a range of useful single-colour slabs in stock (less of an issue when the buyers are parents of threeyearolds).

The Kiddie market also has a tendency to favour bright "day-glo" colours, while professional modellers tend to want something a little less aggressively artificial-looking.

Unique selling points

While Newclay's standard slab colours aren't obviously "special", and they don't sell "toned" selections such as different shades of grey or brown (the idea being that a "pro" is perfectly capable of measuring out quantities of black and white and mixing these up themselves), we were very impressed by the Newplast Pack Number 25, "Multicultural".

Pack 25 is very, very useful, and contains strips in eight different colours, white, putty, yellow, orange, dull red, brown, grey and black. It's intended as "raw material" to allow modellers to mix up a range of skin tones easily, but it's also really handy for making assorted "scenery" models, where one needs a range of organic "material" tones for brickwork, mortar, concrete and wood (and so on), rather than a "rainbow" selection.

They do also sell a traditional "Rainbow" pack (pack 23), and also a garish "Fluorescent" colours pack (pack 26), which someone, somewhere must have a use for (models including neon signage? fluorescent fish? glowing rocket engines?).

External links

• Newplast (newclay.co.uk)