Friday, July 09, 2010

Painted Silicone Deformed Voodoo Zombie Hand Glove

So there it is. I'll be the first to admit it far from perfect, but the whole point of this was that the silicone glove was meant to test the way towards doing the fill head mask. Every time I look at this thing I wish I'd had the material at the time to do a full forearm glove - but I didn't, so it's not, so whatever.

This is the final painted version, by the way. This is way first time attempting to paint with silicone paints, it's not great, but it'll more then work well enough for the movie. Painting with silicone is a weird experience in a way, it's much different from conventional paints - at least at this point in my experience it is.

I won't go on too much about it, since I'm very much an amateur at this sort of thing, so anything I say, or write, would just be speculation based on 20 minute work rather then years of experience.

Anyway, I'm happy with it. The FX for this movie are coming along slowly...very slowly. Mainly due to financial constraints. I don't mind the slower pace though, it gives me more time to suss out what I'm doing and if I'm in fact doing it right.

Because of this pace, I saved myself from a very costly, in both time and money, mistake. I've worked with silicone mainly as a molding material - not as a casting material. The basic difference being you can use it to make a mold or you can use it to create the object in the mold. Now I've read a lot of material about using silicone but never at the time did I need this information for an FX piece, so I wasn't never able to put this information into practice in a sense where I'd remember it.

In doing the silicone mask that will accompany this glove, I debated about the mold material - mainly because of cost. I was going to do it with the same material I used on the glove, Shell Shock, but I wasn't thrilled with the way it turned out. I later realized because I did it wrong, makes sense now. I decided on silicone, because I'm more familiar with it, but neglected at the time to remember some very important.

There's 2 types of silicone, platinum cure and tin cure. And to be very basic about it, platinum will cure in the presence of already cured platinum and tin in the presence of cured tin - but you can't mix the two. It's a bit like "crossing the streams", to quote Egon Spengler. Although there's no potential for death, it's just a massive messy waste of time and money. In my case, my mold was tin cure, my casting silicone was platinum cure - or would have been had I not realized it and turned out with a crappy pile of uncured silicone in my mold which is a massive pain in the ass to clean up.

I've heard some folks say there's no problem if it coated properly and blah, blah, blah, but I'm not interested in experimenting with such expensive materials at the moment.

So that's it for my silicone ranting. Now, can you guess what movie I was watching when I painted the glove?

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