Mahkota Demon

Really happy with this shoot turned out. I spent a long time sculpting this brow/horn piece - I wanted to make something fairly simple but really unique in terms of what I've seen out there for prosthetics. It's a sort of teifling looking set of horns - if you're into D&D you know what I'm talking about.

The piece was a bugger to mould, it's a single piece, covering the bridge of the nose up around the temples to the top of the skulls, horns and brow all one prosthetic. This made for a really tricky challenge to mould properly - at least for me. I had to make sure I didn't have horrible undercuts that were impossible to fill and I wanted to make sure the seams weren't in the most obvious or prominent spots. I spent a slightly sleepless night going over the best way to do it, even when I was sleeping I was still dreaming about how to tackle it.

In the end, it worked even better than I had expected.

It's also the larges prosthetic I have for sale, easily 3x as large (in terms of the amount of foam) as something like The Flayer piece I make. And so far the only really issue with producing it is making sure the horns stay as symmetrical as possible once it's pulled from the mould and the final bits of excess moisture is dried from it - it it's not sitting perfectly in the right shape it'll deform as it's drying. Not the end of the world, but I'd like to look as good as possible for the price I have to charge for it.

This was also my first shoot with Alycia. She had some understanding of prosthetics makeup and some serious modelling experience so we decided to jump right into a very expensive makeup and very long shoot. We kind of did a bit of everything in this shoot just to see how it would work out.

It ended up being a really long day, about 4 hours longer than I expected, but we got a lot of pictures despite the less than great lighting and Alycia did an awesome job. Not everyone can just jump into a full shoot and make all the work with the makeup worth it, especially the first time out - but she totally delivered with this shoot.

Once we settled into the fact that the shots were going to have to look grainy in order to get things in focus, it went pretty smooth. I actually like grainy shots sometimes and I think what we were doing needed a less polished look in the end.

We did five costume changes, technically 4 but I sort of count the head shots we started with - and with each one we started to run more out of steam and have less new ideas. I still think we managed to make it work as well as we could right until the end though.

We definitely exhausted the main room we shot in and since the located was still empty for the day we moved elsewhere in the building and got a few more.