Skullcap Prosthetics - 1st test

I finally got a chance to test my first Skullcap prosthetic. If you've never heard me mention it, I had an idea to create prosthetics for either bald people or people who like using baldcaps - it was sort of inspired by my annoyance of other prosthetics out there on the market that force you to use a baldcap (or actually be bald) but neglected to tell you in the product description.

So I figured, why not. Might be a really niche item in an already niche market - but the moulds are made and it turned out alright, so why not offer it up for sale to anyone who wants it.

Firstly, it was designed on a 21-1/2" head and the model here, John MacDonald, has a 22-1/2" head - and it went on relatively well with only the slightest little fold on one side that ultimately wasn't actually noticeable as a flaw in the end. Will it fit everyone? I highly doubt it, like all prosthetics like this they're generically made and made to fit an average size, so if you feel your skull is average sized, you might be alright. I would guess that anyone with a small head circumference might be in for a problem, although noticeably larger might be perfectly fine.

It took a whole batch of foam to make this one, so it might end up be a slightly more pricey piece along with the horns. However, because it's so thick, the edges held up really well and could be more reusable than most pieces - so it might be worth it for some folks, I guess I'll let them decide.

The design...it's alright. Hard to do something like this for the very first time when you're not sure of the potential problems and all that. It looks okay, I would never brag about it being a great design, but it works really well with the new Baalmoor piece.

I will be throwing it on the site and seeing what the response is. With the appropriate warnings of head sizes and all that. It'll be around $65 I think given how much foam is needed and the amount of resin horns. Still pretty decent price though for something with more reusable potential than most pieces.

So there you go. If you're bald and always wanted to slap a prosthetic on your skull - now you can.

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.

Post Halloween Syndrome

For me Halloween is pretty much year round, so it's not so much all that special in the sense of I can finally see people in costume and all done up looking freaky - I see that all the time. And it's not so much a relaxing time of year as I'm busy getting everyone else ready and usually don't really feel like doing that much myself. Although, without Halloween I wouldn't be making as much money, so for that reason, it is indeed awesome. And it's finally over.

This year was a little quieter than last, for a number of reasons. Although I did a higher amount of retail business, which I was rather happy about. Still having trouble really breaking into the wholesale market. I have a couple clients, but I'd really like 2-3 more. I think it would push things over the edge into making the business much more viable in the long run. So I'm starting early to get that process moving forward rather than waiting until next spring.

One of the things I'm doing this year, and I've mentioned this before, is introducing a couple new prosthetic lines. The main one being female oriented prosthetics, since around 95% of my retail business was from women and I've been told by a wholesale client that it's definitely an unfilled niche in the market - I'm thinking it might not be so niche.

I've got my main positive mould done and I'm about to start testing them to see if they'll fit women better than my current pieces - which I'm well aware won't fit them well. These ones are a little shorter in length from forehead to chin, so I'm hoping it'll work. I'm about to line up the first of a few shoots with some new designs over the next few weeks.

Here's the first sculpt, it's already been moulded and I'm doing a silicone master right now. No name for it yet, I'll decide on one once I see it applied as a character I think. Overall I'm happy with the design, I'm trying to make these ones less monstrous and simply more "obviously not human" looking. This particular one will have some chin spikes as usual, I seem to like doing that.

We'll see soon enough if it all works out. And I hope to be trying out the SkullCap Prosthetics soon as well.

I did a few makeup jobs last year and I think one or two even the year before that, but this year was a bit of a bust. I had a lot lined up and pretty much all, but one, flaked out on me and just never showed up. One cancelled, I'm fine with that, but just not showing up I found a little rude. Their loss.

Anyway, the one I did end up doing turned out awesome. I even kinda impressed myself with it. My first time relying totally on my airbrush for all the makeup. Not one bit of grease or creme makeup was used.  You can't really see the details in the picture, but overall it was blended pretty well and looked decently freaky. I used the Borom Demon piece and just did a fleshy colouring with it, some spots and reddish colouring as well, it wasn't too crazy. We went for a more, I guess you could call it realistic look. And he bought a Shrunken Demon Head to fill out the look.

It's been years since I've seen the movie, but this piece unintentionally reminds me of Rawhead Rex.

I'm not cranking out piles of prosthetics a day for the moment, so I can take a bit of a rest and start working on redesigning some older pieces that were never master moulded and creating some new ones. And even working on a few more Demonic Antiquities pieces, first on that list is a Mummy Hand. We'll see how that goes.

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.

The Corpse Head prop

This isn't so much a "how to" post so much as archiving or for curiosity. The Corpse Head prop was one I wanted to make early on, but because we had to start shooting before we had any money it was scraped in favour of a cheap paper mache one. Well, since then our lead redneck villain had to drop out and those scenes all need to be reshot (as well as rewritten) so I got my chance to do this bad boy up and I have to say I'm really happy with the result so far. And yes, I believe I will be offering this up for sale online, but it won't be cheap.

So, I had the idea of what I wanted to do early on and how I wanted to do it too. I have a medical skeleton skull so I used it as my base. Kind of cheating, but it did help speed things up and remove a lot of guess work in making it look alright.

I start by slapping clay onto the skull and getting the basic shape. Leaving the teeth exposed because I didn't feel like sculpting them, especially with everything else I'm sculpting these days I'm willing to cut corners where it works.

After a few hours of sculpting I ended up with this, not too bad looking. I gave him some wounds and whatnot that will match up with a corresponding silicone mask that I'll be making soon.

I used Rebound 25 to make the mould, I decided not to make it a 2 part mould since it will be a somewhat soft(ish) final piece. So I just coated the whole thing making allowing that it would be split up the back of thead.

I don't recall how long it took to do the mould, but since I started in the evening I guess it was at least another day. Here's the final silicone mould with a Pasti-Paste support shell. You can see what looks like a bit of a ridge here along the back of the head, that's there I split it open.

Here's the whole thing pulled apart. It was a bit of a struggle getting the clay and the skull out, but it eventually ripped out. You can see the silicone mould flipped inside out here.

And the poor skull afterwards. The lower jaw was originally attached with springs, they got stretched and destroyed. Ah well, it finally served a purpose after all these years. I got this in a thing called "20 lb Bag of Bones" years ago, you can no longer get them, only 10 lbs bags now. That's the way things were in those days.

Wasn't much to see until this point. But I used Vytaflex 40 to do a slush casting in the mould, which was tricky since I've never used the stuff before and it's pretty runny. I did one layer at a time, letting it thicken up a bit each time. Not a perfect method, but it did work. I have a nice urethane skin filled with flexible foam inside. I even attached a pvc pipe with a hole drilled it in to attach it to the corpse body.

It's not done, it need to be all painted up. That's the next step in experimenting. I've never painted urethane, but I'm well aware it's a pain in the ass. My plan is to use another Smooth-On product called Brush-On 40 that can be tinted and thinning out and supposedly makes for a good urethane paint. We'll see soon enough.