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.
