Monday, January 27, 2014

Prosthetic, part 1

The biggest part of getting the Penguin prosthetic right was sculpting it.  Fortunately I already had a good cast of my face, so I started with molding plastiline clay on top of the face.  I went through a few different phases of sculpting to get what we thought was a good nose:






The last one seemed good, so I built a dam around the edges with clay and stuck it in a box in case of spillover:



Here's where the fun began.  I sprayed the whole thing liberally with mold release and slathered on plaster.  After a day I went to remold it only to find that the mold release really doesn't work well with plaster-on-plaster.  Cue panic!  Fortunately the plaster I was using was low-quality, and the face cast was high-quality, plus the new stuff was fresh so I was able to "release" the mold from the face with the liberal application of a hammer.  Then I resculpted the nose and got advice.  My experienced sources said to use vaseline next time, so I did.  A thorough coat of vaseline served as a good release, and this time I got a nice plaster mold of the nose with very little clay to clean out:




Next post: casting.

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