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Sculpting/Mould Making

bray, stuart (2011) Prosthetic Sculpting Tutorial Video Part 1: blocking out. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66V7egZo308 (Accessed: 9 May 2015)

I started sculpting by mapping out the basic shapes. I used monster clay for this sculpt which I found hard to work with. I warmed up the cay but it cooled down quickly which made it very difficult to sculpt with. To help me with my stages of sculpting I watched online tutorials whilst sculpting. This really helped me progress my sculpt; when I found myself stuck with how to take the next step, the tutorial would prompt me for what to do next. I used my design as reference material for this as I was happy with how the design looked and felt it conveyed, the emphasise of the weight of the skin dragging down so I kept this in mind whilst creating the folds of skin.

It took me longer than expected to get the initial shapes that I was happy with. I often took a step back to see how it looked, ad it looked to me too like an old age sculpt which is what I wanted to stay away from. I tried to reduce the folds and try to create the weight at the bottom of the folds. The more I sculpted the more my piece started to remind me of the character ‘Vincent’ in ‘House of wax’. Vincent wears a mask made from wax to hide his face, which gets melted at one point; it was interesting to see how it looked similar to the skin weighing down. I used this as a reference image as well, however, I did not want this to look like a horror makeup so I had to keep this in mind to not make it look too deformed or creepy.

TheMac (2013) Top 12 Scariest Horror Masks. Available at: http://geekshizzle.com/2013/05/17/top-12-scariest-horror-masks/ (Accessed: 9 May 2015)

I continued to use Stuart’s tutorials to help e texture my piece, I found the tutorials gave me very useful techniques on how to texture skin. The problem with this tutorial however, was that he was texturing for an old age sculpt. I found it very hard to make my sculpt look like skin without looking too old. I used various stipple sponges to texture the piece, and experimented with different pressures. I found making the indents and then smoothing over with a sponge really helped soften the lines making them less obvious.  I used a sharp tool to create pores all over the face, this really helped to make my piece look more realistic

bray, stuart (2014) Sculpting Prosthetics: Skin Textures. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IAc2hDCHlQ (Accessed: 9 May 2015)

I used different thicknesses of plastics with my tools in order to soften the lines, as well as a blowtorch to soften the clay. It took a while until I felt happy with my sculpt, once I had finished the texturing I powdered the piece and then grounded the piece up using Wayne’s example for grounding, using 2p pieces to cut out neat holes for my keys ready to be moulded

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