Making Hand Moulds

 

I felt that the fingers on the original sculp were too short, so I extended them. I decided to cast the hands in dragon skin as it's far more flexible than latex and unlike most silicone; you can mix it with acrylic paint to get the colour you want.

Once happy with the sculp I lay down the hand and clayed up to roughly halfway up the hand. After smoothing out the clay and adding registration points I put walls around it and filled with plaster. When the plaster had set I removed the walls, flipped it over and removed the clay. I then put walls around it, clayed the internal and extenral edges of the walls, sprayed all of the exposed plaster with wax based release agent and poured in the plaster. When set I removed the original splasticine sculpt, leaving a two part mould in the plaster. I repeated the proccess for the other hand.

When I had both moulds I made armatures using twisted bansai wire, cut lengths of K&S braqss tubing (to slot into the forarms of the main body armature). before gluing the wire wrists into the K&S Icut strips of heat shrink rubber tube on them, to strengthen the twisted wire and lesssen the friction between the wire and the K&S.

Once the armatures were ready I mixed the dragon skin with acrylic paint and poured in a thin layer to skin of the mould and make sure there would be no airbubbles of the outer surface of the hands. When skin layer set, I lay the armatures inside the deeper halves fo the mould, poured more flesh tone drogon skin in, closed and claped the moulds shut.

I took them out and trimmed back the seems to make the hands complete. I made more hand armatures and cast several more pairs of hands, so that I would have spare ones, once the wire in the fingers or wrist snapped.

Making Mould for Head

Firstly I wanted to make a mould of the original head so I could make copies incase anything went wrong. I decided to make the mould from silicone so I could cast it in fast cast resin so it would be hard and solid. And the general rule is to make a soft/flexible mould for hard casts and to make a hard mould for soft casts. This is so you can remove the cast from the mould without damaging either.


I extended the bottom of the head to allow me to make a reccess for the neck and also to create a larger contact area for the replacement mouths. After cutting down some bolser wood to bulk out the replacement mouth section (to save on weight) I sculpted the mouth template over the top with sculpy, banked it and built up a shallow registration wall around the inside edge of the mouth (using superfine milliput).

Putting the mouth template asside, I clayed up the back half of the head, added a sinker as a pour hole and registration points and then after putting walls around it, I clayed up the inner and outter edges of the wall (to stop the silicone seeping out).

I then mixed and poured in some mould making silicone. After the silicone went off, I removed the walls, allong with all the clay, turned upside down, added walls, clayed up the internal and external edges, and after sparying a wax based release agent over all of the exposed silicone, I poured in more silicone (making sure the top of highest point of the sculp was substancially covered) to give me the second half of the mould.

Once the mould was complete, I removed the original sculp and any remaingin clay, and then poured in some fast cast to make a cast of the head. However the fast cast I was using was very old so it came out a bit greasy with an unusually high amount of air bubble and was also too heavy. So to remedy this I bought some new fast cast and cast the next head with a hollow shell inside (in this case I used a casing from a kinder surprise as it happened to fit well!). After it was set I snapped off the sinker and sanded down the seams.