Gashed cheeks

After our first attempt at making up a prosthetic arm wound I decided to try something a little more delicate - a face wound. This time Alana was my guinea pig. The whole effect took over two hours to achieve, probably because this was my first ever attempt at working with latex and makeup!

First I carefully cut out two oval shapes from two sheets of single ply toilet paper and checked their size on Alana's cheeks. They needed to be cut down and made smaller to fit. Then I created a flap of skin on one by dabbing water on the toilet paper and pushing my finger through. For the other cheek I made a gash using scissors. It could take several goes to get two pieces that you are happy with. Luckily both pieces worked out nicely on my first attempt. I then applied latex on Alana's face and stuck on my ovals. Using a hair dryer on cold I sped up the curing process. Then I gently applied more liquid latex to the toilet paper which acted as a base for the latex to adhere to. Again this had to dry before I applied a coat of Mehron castor sealer. This is what the first stage looked like:



After the sealer had taken effect I gently blotted off the excess. Then I applied Revlon liquid foundation over the top.

Tip: if you have not sealed your latex properly liquid mineral makeup will eat into it!

This gave the prosthetic a skin tone. Notes for the future: if I had to do this effect again I would have used foundation to cover the face to lessen the difference between the prosthetic and real skin. This would have taken more time. I'd also like to point out that this was my first ever attempt at using makeup too. And it looked like this:



Taking out our trusty bruise wheel I then applied some red makeup to the area under the fake latex skin. To do this I used a size 0 sable paint brush as I thought that size would give me a degree of control when colouring the surface. After doing this I used some setting powder. It turned out like this:



You may have noticed that the edges of the fake skin shriveled up a bit, while I don't mind this in some ways, I think this is far from what real skin is like. I think I will have to do some research into other materials to use as a basis for skin. Overall for a first attempt I think this works well enough for a camera range of a two or more metres (yards). After this I applied some Mehron coagulated blood gel, which made it look like this:



Blood helped improve the effect a lot. Watering down the blood gel a little gave it a bit of run which looked more realistic. The blood smears also somewhat disguise the join between the prosthetic and real skin. Again, makeup applied to the entire face would blend the tone between the prosthetic and the real skin underneath more. This would take longer again to get right, probably three hours total, but with practice I suspect I could get the whole thing down to 2 hours. I also noticed a little white under one prosthetic, which could be setting powder or perhaps the toilet paper base. This could be easily fixed with makeup. Criticisms aside, here is the final shot:



Alana was feeling tired by this stage, so she removed the prosthetics shortly after this shot was taken. As Alana has very fine white hairs on her cheeks they were a tad painful to remove as some of the hairs got ripped out.

Next up Alana will write about the zombie makeup effect practice we did on my brother in preparation for a zombie shuffle. Then I'll write about making realistic fake blood and 'pre-made' scabs.