Demon Headshots, Hoana Demon

This piece was a bit of a bugger to make. I started a version back in August/September of 2017 - got too busy to finished it and finally moulded it in December of 2017 only to massive screw up the mould and totally ruin it. I then came up with an idea to make it fit better to I did a bit of work on that and started sculpting it again in January 2018. I finished it up and moulded it about a month or more ago.

The original shoot date was delayed because of crap weather so I let it sit for close to 3 weeks sitting over a forced air heating vent in order to dry it out. I didn't want to risk leaving it in an oven with it being so cold and having it crack. Although it's a pretty thick mould.

The thickness, while making it pretty strong, also made it difficult to cast in that my first attempt turned out like garbage. I wasn't sure at first if it was still not totally dried out or the foam hadn't properly gelled or what. Second attempt, garbage. At that point I realized it was just too thick a piece and too thick a mould so it was building up steam - a few vent holes and another attempt at casting it and it turned out near perfect.

It's easily the biggest single piece I've ever made. Normally a cowl piece this size is cast from a 500 gram run of foam (2 1/2x a normal run of foam), this one came in at 700 grams. Might not seem like much, but when you consider that from a normal run of 200 grams of foam, I can produce on average $325 worth of retail prosthetics. So this is a pretty expensive piece in those terms.

I wanted to make sure it would also fit better than my usual attempts at cowls. I don't tend to fuss with bald caps and all that crap - I don't consider myself a great makeup artist -  so there's always an issue with models with long hair getting it all tucked up under the cowl. I made a plug of sorts that just pops onto the back (or wherever) of any mould so there ends up being a void in the cowl that makes fitting so much quicker and accurate.

I got these contacts on clearance, normally they're pretty pricey, but I lucked out and got them for only $50. I'm normally not a fan of "cats eye" type lenses, these are obviously much different from that design but they do have a specific direction to them. I thought they'd look better sideways rather than up and down, and that was good call apparently.

Also I had to do some extra post work on the eyes since the overall look I have the shots totally ruined the look of the contacts, so I had to do a bit of work there - it was well worth it though.

The Seer

This shoot got put on hold for a couple weeks following some major temperature swings that caused my very steep driveway to become a sheet of ice that my poor truck was unable to navigate safely, effectively trapping me in my house for a while. We got it sanded (last time it rained nearly hours afterwards wasting the effort) and I got out and we finally managed to do it.

The makeup was quick to apply since it was all pre-painted, the eyes were just painted resin with gloss (and some red strands of yarn for a bloodshot look) that popped into holes in the foam latex perfectly - they didn't even need to be glued so I was able to alter the direction they were looking a couple times.

The idea with The Seer is that through a series of weird experiments attempting to imbue a human host with the powers of second sight (an ability naturally occurring in a couple Demonic species) a young woman is horribly disfigured, although she did gain psychic abilities - the ability to see death, not just hers or the people in her immediate surrounding, but a constant barrage of images of death from every living being on the planet.

This piece was one of the more fun (and perhaps challenging) pieces I've made in some time. Based off a bit of production artwork from the MMO The Secret World (now Secret World Legends), it seemed a pretty easy thing to copy without straying too far from the original concept.

I didn't obviously copy it exactly, the eye placement and size is different, but overall I wanted to stick close to it, since I really liked it. I don't recall seeing this character in game, so I had no idea what the other side of the face looked like - and knowing I couldn't leave Kayla (the model) blind, I created my own take on what it might look like allowing her at least one good eye.

Adding the eyes was what made it work so well. I've never been good at making realistic eyes, but I figured they would work given their surroundings. I already had half-sphere moulds the right size so I made a bunch of silicone copies and used them as eyeball placeholder - popping them out once I was ready to mould it.

I then made white resin blanks, painted an iris and pupil, using strands of red yarn and a thick gloss whipped up a pile of eyeballs that just popped into place once the whole thing was painted.

I had to glue little sticks on the backs of them while I painted to making it easier to handle them and give them a gloss coating, the sticks were just snapped off once I needed them.

Once we were done I decided to pop by a local Halloween store (open only on Fridays this time of year) and we did a bunch of random shots there.

Demon Headshots, Cobalt Nyanga Demon

Another Demon headshot shoot - this one was pretty quick.