A whole bunch of random crap

I've been working on a few things at once, so this post is going to be a little everywhere all at once.

First, I've been trying to do a Demon Calendar, nothing too spectacular, just about 12 new images. I've got 4 done so far and I think about 3 more shoots lined up and I'll see where it goes after that. No idea where I'll be printing them or how I'll be selling them. All I know is, I'm trying to keep it on the non-expensive side.

Here's a few outtake images from the shoots so far:

I've been airbrushing only as well with the makeup this time out. Slightly faster, when the airbrush isn't clogging up - but way better end results, so it's worth it.

Second, I'm hoping to wrap up some new props by tomorrow. You've probably seen them or heard or read about me mentioning them before, the "Thing in a Jar" props. I've been meaning to get around to finding proper jars and finishing a 3rd one and I should have them online by tomorrow night if all goes well.

Third, I've been slowly whittling away at some ideas for the reshoot of the BZK! web series and one thing I really want to refocus my attention on are the FX. I've complained about this before and I really wasn't happy about how I was handling the zombie makeup. That's not to say I wasn't happy with what my two makeup artists, Maggy and Krista, were doing - they were doing exactly what I told them and they did a great job. I'm referring more to keeping things more organized and on track.

As the shoots went by, with each one, the makeup become more and more rushed. That should never have happened and was the biggest mistake (aside from letting just anyone volunteer) on the series. So for next time, we're really going to make an effort that the quality of the zombies is much better and not rushed.

One thing I'll be doing is trying some "out of mouth" dentures. At least that's how I've heard them referred to, they use them a lot on The Walking Dead and it's where you create a pair of dentures that latch onto your teeth, but they overlap your lips, so when a prosthetic is applied over them it can have the lips peeled back way more than humanly possible with series pain or surgery. If that makes sense.

The overall principle behind making them is pretty simple and I reckon I'll attempt a few test pairs over the winter. It should go a long way to really sell the zombie look and I might even be able to offer them up for sale with a bit of work.

Another thing I'm debating about, and again this was inspired by The Walking Dead - is their use of animatronic or puppet zombie heads in the foreground. There were a few shots in season 2 where I noticed in the extreme foreground, so you only saw it's face or down to it's shoulders, a very decayed looking zombie. You really only saw them for maybe a few seconds, enough to really get a sense of the thing,  pretty simple effect and if I have enough of a budget I'll be trying that trick as well hopefully.

Other than that, I'm finishing up my last prosthetic of the year. I'm running low on supplies so I don't want to make another huge expense for myself so I'm doing as much as I can with what I have left and I'm running low on master mould supplies. I've got my 3rd female oriented piece to finish up today and then perhaps a new pair of ears and that will be it for this year.

I've got a few older designs I want to redo, but they'll have to wait for now.

And lastly, while I haven't even started it yet, I do plan on building my foam latex oven this winter. Could be awesome, could be a disaster - I won't know until I get around to it I guess.

Dust Troll Redux

I started my first redesign of one of my older pieces, one of many. As I believe I started before, the reason behind this is just because some of my older pieces were never master moulded and the original moulds are long since gone, so I thought it seemed like a good time to update them - having not only seen what potential problems there were with them, but just because they were older pieces and I've improved a lot in the sculpting department since then.

First up was the Dust Troll, this is one I really wanted to redo. I really liked the design when I first made it but over time saw how many issues there were with it. It kinda lacked any character - plus the tusks were a pain in the ass. All future pieces with horns, tusks or spikes, will all be using the resin pieces instead of having them as one solid foam piece. Making sculpting, moulding and casting so much easier to do it this way.

Just letting the mould dry out after cleaning it for now and I'll be master moulding it tomorrow and hopefully doing a shoot with it this weekend. Really looking forward to seeing how it looks applied and painted up.

Another new line of prosthetics

There's a while backlog of stuff I've been meaning to do this year for Halloween, but life and the whole web series thing really got in the way. Now I have more free time to actually work and I've started working on a couple new things, 2 new lines of prosthetics.

I know I mentioned one of these before, either here or just on Facebook, I don't even remember anymore where I mention things. I really should keep track of that.

Back when I was just buying prosthetics online one thing I encountered that continually annoyed me was the size of some of the pieces. Most of them were way too high on the forehead for the average person to wear without needing a bald cap - however next to none of them ever mentioned that fact so I would end up with a piece I couldn't use on just anybody with having to apply a pain in the ass bald cap as well. And some were just too large for female models or actors so I had to trim them down and try to blend in these massive edges as best I could.

I decided when I started making mine to never do that, to try to stay within a defined area so that nothing but the piece and makeup would be needed. And that they'd be wearable by most everyone - that's pretty difficult since women have small or shorter face, might not seem like it but it's pretty obvious when you try to put an average size prosthetic on them.

This all lead me to two ideas that I'm finally getting around to:

Skullcap Prosthetics
Now there might be a good reason why I've never seen these before, I guess I'm willing to find out the hard way. During the course of doing the first "Demons" book I worked with quite a few bald folks have encountered more since who are interested in this stuff so I began thinking - if there are already pieces out there that require a bald cap why not make pieces specifically for that? Both bald people and those that don't mind using bald caps.

The idea is to keep them fairly small and one two part moulds, I don't want to get into doing 3-4 part moulds. So they'll stick pretty close to the crown of the head or maybe the front or back. This would give a little more variety and dramatically alter the shape of the human head. I'm just hoping I can get them averaged size enough. Slightly on the small size would be stretchable at least to a few sizes larger, that's the best I can think of right now.

This is sort of a top-down angle on the very first attempt at one of these pieces. It's pretty simple, kind of Predator inspired. The holes are obviously for the many various resin spikes and horns I have. I'm hoping if this one is a success, I'll need to try it on a few different people to be sure, then I'll move on and finally get around to creating some big-assed horns. With a large piece to attach them to, it should work. Time will tell.

Hopefully they pan out, could be a decent corner of the market.

Female Only Prosthetics.
As I mentioned earlier on, there's a huge issue and a gap in the market for prosthetics that fit women well. The ones I've tried, full faces at least, tend to be way too long and end up looking sloppy. Or way too high on the forehead - same results.

I wouldn't have thought there was such a market, but I've had more women interesting in doing demon photo shoots than men on average and I've been told my one of my major wholesale clients there is indeed a huge hole in that market no one has yet to really show any concern about. And if this Halloween season has been any indication, he's right. Almost 95% of my retail orders were from women this year.

So I'm hoping to get these started this weekend and online in time for Halloween as soon as possible. At least one of each, all depends since I have to start from scratch and I need to test them to make sure they're doing to perform as intended.

I might even start doing female versions of some of the already existing full face pieces, who knows.

Holy crap, your arm fell off!

One of the simpler FX for the BZK! web series is a severed arm. I've never actually done this before, but I know the basic principles. This shouldn't be really taken as a proper "how to" sort of thing, but that's your choice.

I wanted a cheaply made fake arm for an actor to run around with, it had to be durable and take a beating while still being light and cheap. So silicone was out, although it would look pretty realistic. I thought about urethane rubber but I don't have enough experience so I finally settled on a latex, foam filled arm. This was the cheapest method I could think of.

The supplies were simple, some alginate - I think about 4 lbs was used. Monster Makers Clay, which can be melted to a liquid. Water based clay for making a 2 part UltraCal 30 mould. And finally some latex from Monster Makers and I tried using their expanding polyfoam to fill the arm with.

First, I had the actor come by, Tim Wartman, and I made a very makeshift frame for the alginate. Here's where I made my first sort of mistake. While this worked, I think the alginate I chose and the frame were all wrong. This alginate was filled with fibres for more vertical surfaces and the frame should have just been a tube - didn't have access to better frame building materials, so we had to do this.

While there's nothing really wrong with the alginate I went with, I do think it was the cause of some of the air pockets and lumps in the mould. Here I poured in the first batch of melted clay. My next mistake.

It took some time to fill it all up and let it harden again.

Here's the final clay arm. It wasn't so awesome looking.

You can see here the ridges that each batch of melted clay created. It probably would've worked better had I done one large batch, but I just didn't have the means to do that at this time.

Here's it is after I resculpted most of the surface details. I got tired of it after several hours and thought, "it's going to look cheesy anyway, why am I wasting all this time?" So I cut corners and called it done.

Forgot to get a picture of it with just the clay wall before the first coat of UltraCal, but here it is after that first coat.

And here it is with the first half of the mould done and ready for the 2nd. I kinda suck and 2 part mould making, especially something this big. I've done some decent ones in the past, but I was sort of in a hurry.

And here's what's left of the alginate mould by the way.

So, there's nothing really to see at this point, it's too hard taking pictures while I'm working. So with the 2nd half of the mould done I cleaned it all out - and I was surprised how easy demoulding and cleaning was. I was really expecting a bit of a fight here and it pretty much just popped apart.

With the final mould done I filled it with tinted latex - which is impossible to show since it's inside the mould and I can't take a picture while I'm filling it. I let that dwell in the mould for a bit - for anyone wondering what the hell that means, for latex for form a good skin you need to just let it sit in the mould while the UltraCal does its magic and sucks the moisture from the latex forming a skin.

Then you dump the excess latex out and let it cure. I left it in the sun for most of the day and overnight and thought that would do it. Unfortunately there's just no way to check, so you have to hope for the best.

The next step was to just assume the latex had cured and fill it with expanding foam. I've used Smooth-On's Flex FoamIt but thought I'd try Monster Makers foam - I had no idea it began to work so fast and here's what happened within what seemed like 15 seconds.

Luckily I had some Smooth-On foam and went with that. Filled it up and let it sit, demoulded it only to find the latex hadn't cured in spots so the foam crept though and nearly ruined the mould, I think I got it cleaned out well enough and I'm trying a 2nd now.

Here's the first arm from the mould - it's far from perfect, but for our purposes it actually is kind of perfect. There's some major surface defects, pock marks and the like. One of the fingers looks a little crushed too - however, for the scene I need it for first, the arm's been used to fend off a horde of zombies so having it look a little battle weary is just fine.

 It's not painted at this point, that'll come tomorrow for a shoot the day after. It's pretty lightweight and totally safe to smack someone with, you'll feel it but it doesn't really hurt at all. Can't wait to shoot with it.

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