Corona Virus Lockdown and Working from Home!

Hello everyone!

With the country in lockdown for the next few weeks, our tutoring has switched from being in the classroom to online - which has presented us with a whole new set of problems! Working together as a group we managed to solve the seemingly endless connectivity issues and we got our lecture in the end!

So what did we get up to?

Just before we left college we had been in the process of sculpting our own prosthetic pieces, something that I found a lot more challenging than I anticipated! I had never sculpted anything before and started without looking at enough reference photos. It was difficult when searching for references to distinguish between real injuries and other people's special effects makeup! I quickly realised that I needed to use the correct language instead of words like cut it needed to be laceration and so on. I got the hang of it eventually, avoided undercuts and produced a piece that I was really pleased with. We cast the mould for our pieces as a group out of Herculite plaster (plaster of Paris) which is a good product to use as it is inexpensive, light and easy to use, however it is still a chemical reaction and plaster gets hot as it sets and carries with it a risk of injury if used incorrectly. Herculite plaster is used because of its shore level - which means that it is not as hard as diamond and therefore bubbles and edges can be sanded away easily. Another con of creating plaster moulds is that it sets hard and can therefore make it quite difficult to remove a piece once it has been cast and they are not very robust, they are susceptible to breakage in a way that silicone moulds are not but also, casting a silicone mould is expensive! Once our moulds set we then filled them with encapsulated silicone.

Skip forward a week and we are now working from home! I finished off my encapsulating at college in a rush and when I came to turning my piece out I saw that the Baldiez/acetone layers had been applied too thickly and not allowed to dry enough between each application and therefore my piece had lots of micro bubbles in it. My laceration was actually quite easy to turn out which I was very happy with as I was worried that my bubbly encapsulation would make it difficult. We applied our own pieces to our selves and coloured them with alcohol activated paints at home with online guidance from our tutor. I have applied and coloured latex pieces before but this was my first time applying a silicone piece. I used Pros-Aide glue from Kryolan to apply my piece as it is water based, dries clear, applies thinly and is a good strong adhesive. I decided against using spirit gum as it is harder to remove and is more irritating to my skin. I powdered around my piece as a guide of where to apply the glue and started to from the left side. I didn't stretch my piece enough as I applied it and the blending edge became wrinkly on one side. I should have waited longer for the glue to dry to avoid this. Luckily I had some acetone at home to enable me to blend my edges nicely into my skin. I was also really pleased I had given myself such a large blending edge around my sculpt as I had some stray patches of silicone close to the flashing edge that I could blend away from behind with the acetone and get rid of those.

Moving on to the paint process I was already familiar with the technique of stippling in different skin tones but when I first started I thought I was making my piece more obvious instead of blending it but stuck with it, had to use IPA and wipe away the colour and start again which helped. I realised there wasn't enough red/pink tones. also adding in a touch of warmer brown tones along one side helped blend the piece with the freckles on my arm. I liked that I added a thin layer of fresh blood tones over my yellow cutaneous tissue to make it look nice and fresh. It was disappointing to still see the bubbles in the Baldiez but next time I cast a prosthetic I'll know to make it thinner! I added a touch of glycerin and blood to my piece which added a nice sheen to it but next time I might use just a lighter coloured blood as the glycerin made it separate.

Overall I was very pleased with my work yesterday, I managed to achieve a level of realism that I haven't previously met. I learnt a lot from the mistakes that I made and definitely want to get better at casting as it is a skill I know ill be able to take forward into my working career and already I have created another sculpt that I want to make a mould of!

Thanks for reading!

Fern x