Tips for making ice cubes with Ecapso-K
If you are a food and drink photographer, you might have heard of using fake ice for photos that won’t melt into your drinks. I first saw Joanie at @TheBiteShot mentioning this Encapso-K for making “ice” that actually floats, so I wanted to give it a try!
This stuff works really well for prop ice too, decor, or prop glass. It makes pretty realistic looking “glass” shards that won’t cut you 🙌🏻
Here are some tips for using Encapso-K silicone rubber for making ice cubes:
1. Use silicone molds for pouring your Encapso-K to make it easier to remove. You’re still going to end up breaking some pieces getting them out, but it’s much easier with silicone molds.
2. Add a thin layer of petroleum jelly to the molds, or you can use a mold release spray. The petroleum jelly will leave some streaks on your fake ice cubes, but I don’t think it’s noticeable in liquid, and it doesn’t bother me that much.
3. Rinse your cubes before using. This stuff is messy and leaves silicone crumbs when you break these or just rub the corners of the cubes. So make sure you rinse off your cubes before doing photos with them.
4. Because of those stray crumbs, I don’t recommend drinking beverages after using this fake ice. This is listed as non-toxic, but those loose pieces might still end up in the drink and you probably don’t want to ingest that.
5. Make several different sizes of cubes. I made the larger cubes and broke them into smaller pieces. Depending on the size of your glass or what look you’re going for, you’ll probably want to play around with a few different sizes of these cubes for your photography. Really small ice cube molds might be hard to release the silicone, so breaking the larger ones into smaller pieces is probably easier than trying to get this out of very small ice cube molds.
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