Making a mold of Draper's Face

I won't say it went well, but it certainly wasn't the disaster I sort of expected.

If you've been paying attention, you probably know I just got supplies for making my own prosthetics. I've never really attempted anything like this before, nor am I really familiar with the materials involved or how they work.

The biggest problem I ran into was the fact that when I ordered the stuff, that ultimately cost me $550 after shipping and customs, $400 before, was that I asked - on the phone, so I was talking to a real person - if there was anything else beside what came in the kit that I would need to do this. The answer was a more or less no, maybe a few little things I could most likely get any any convenience store. I was okay with that, seemed reasonable.

Well, that was sort of a lie. A very big, another $200 lie actually. I won't bother going into what else was needed, but it was fairly easy to track it all down. Still, it would've been nice to have some idea, since it was pretty obvious from the phone conversation that I had no idea how to do this.

Anyway, I guess it was worth it. I probably could've spent three times as much experimenting on my own trying to figure out what I needed. It was a big help for the first step in doing this. I will say I learned a lot, and I know better what I need to do for next time.

I won't bother breaking down the process in too much detail, there's much better information on how to do this online pretty much anywhere if you really look.

First, I tried to minimize the amount of mess, so Draper
got himself a fancy new wardrobe.

Now a swanky bald-cap!

Then I slathered face cream and petroleum jelly on his face,
just for fun - this wasn't really part of the process.
Actually, it's so all his facial didn't get ripped out.

And then I mixed up some alginate - I hate this stuff.
It's one of those picky ratio mixes and you can really
only use it once to make a casting - it's really crumbly
and sets up fast.

Mulder was amused by the whole process at least.

Then some plaster bandages to give the alginate
a strong backing, it's too weak to hold it's shape on it's own.

And about 20 minutes later it came out not too bad.
Not great, but not bad for my first attempt.

I sucked at this part. Again one of those weird ratio mixtures
38:100 - Ultracal to Water.

And after leaving it for as long as I could stand this thing came out.

There were some air bubbles, they can be removed with a dremel though - if you have one. But the area around the nose was pretty broken. We were nervous about getting too much of the alginate around his nose, it was so runny and heavy it kept sliding down and almost covering his nostrils.

No worries though, the prosthetic I intend to make doesn't need nostrils. The other annoying part you can't really see here is that I did have any proper way to support the mold while putting the Ultracal in and it kinda flattened the tip of the nose - shouldn't effect it too much though - I wasn't planning on added too much prosthetic there either.

So now I have to sculpt the prosthetic mask I want to make on this, and then make a negative mold. The two will then go together with the liquid foam latex in it, I'll cook it for a bit and if I did alright I will have my very first prosthetic - which will be for the character of Cronus in The Monkey Rodeo: Cronus.

We'll see how that all works out soon enough.