Fictive marsupial dinner

A concept photo shoot playing with the disgusting and the beautiful...the edible and the inedible...what is food and what is other

Fictitious marsupial creature with hair

The creature I've been working on has changed yet again after I spent last night punching hair into it. The hair has added another element to this fictitious marsupial and has made the creature seem a little more real: being somewhere between a blind mole-rat, weasel and possum. The intent was to create a fictional carnivourous burrowing marsupial, which I could later use in a photoshoot.











I learned a a number of things from making this small creature:

Chavant clay for smaller parts is useful as it is harder and retains its shape, but is harder to get detail and texture into.

Smaller creatures are not necessarily easier to make: they become more fiddly to sculpt, more difficult to make moulds than larger pieces, tricker to place pour holes in moulds and are challenging to assemble.

I learned how to create mechanical bonds between silicone and other substances.

After seaming mould lines the silicone can be smoothed with IPA and then a dulling agent can be brushed over the surface when the silicone has cured. I still have some way to go with seaming but I improved with this piece somewhat.

Hand painting silicone pieces can achieve some effects but I need to learn how to airbrush with thinned down silicone paints.

I could have made this creature with a solid silicone core rather than a jelly wax core. I also could have run another two batches of silicone down the mould lines when sealing the two halves, as this could have been a little thicker. A solid silicone core would have negated this problem entirely.

Hair punching takes time and patience.

Making creatures takes time. In many ways because this was small with lots of moulds it probably took a similar amount of time as what it would take to make something much larger.

Fictitious marsupial creature hand painted

Yesterday I surprised myself and managed to get this little critter painted. As always I learned something from painting this creature and while I think hand painting silicone with silicone paints is a poor cousin to airbrushing with thinned down paints I'm relatively pleased with how the painting I did changed the appearance of this fictive marsupial. I also discovered a way to dull down silicone paints which come up a bit too glossy when hand painted. Here are a few shots of the creature after painting and before I attempt hair punching:

Fictitious marsupial creature seamed, assembled and patched

After some work over the last two days I've finally just finished assembly and patching of seams of my fictitious carnivourous marsupial. One word describes the seaming, assembly and patching of this creature: fiddly. Very fiddly. Not unenjoyably so, but a challenge. I've improved my silicone seaming greatly, but still have much room for improvement.

She still isn't painted yet but I thought I'd do a bit of a photo update and show the work in progress before hand painting using silicone paints and punching in a 'crest' of hair along the back. Although I possibly could do an experiment with airbrushing thinned down silicone paints if I bought another airbrush to fit our existing compressor.

I decided to photograph the creature on a non-stick baking tray as it had a bit of an autopsy look to it.

Side front:



Facing up, the creature on its back:



Side back:



Close up rear:




Close up front:



Hope you like it.

Fictitious marsupial creature build

Over the past few months I've been working on creating a small fictitious marsupial in silicone. I liked the idea of photographing the finished piece as a 'found' dead animal in the Australian bush. Sort of like creating a fake animal discovery. I also had the idea of creating a tunneling carnivorous creature, something like a cross between a blind mole rat and a carnivorous possum. I also wanted it to be a bit ambiguous as to if it was an adult specimen or juvenile. This blog does not feature the completed piece, but shows the work in progress.

The sculpt was done in chavant clay on several aluminium armatures. I chose chavant clay rather than plasticine as it is a bit harder and you can sort of carve it a bit unlike plasticine. I also made 12 long claws out of resin to fit the sculpture. Previously my family had reared a baby wombat who had amazing long claws, so this figured somewhat in this. Here is the creature partially assembled in clay:



After sculpting I then had to make a number of moulds for each separate piece of the creature. This creature has a total of seven different moulds. Five of the moulds I made in silicone, one in fibreglass and one in stone. Here is a shot of the creature with the mould wall and another shot with half the fibreglass mould made:





Here are the seven moulds in total that I needed to make to construct the creature:



Sculpting the creature took me a couple of weeks of sporadic work, making the moulds took me another week, and then running it with silicone and then cleaning up the seams has taken me another couple of days. I suspect assembling, painting and hair punching may take another couple of weeks of on and off work. Here is a picture of the six individual parts of the creature:



With the 12 claws in silicone it has a total of 18 pieces. With hindsight it would have been easier to make a slightly bigger creature as the pour holes for the moulds had to be pretty small and this posed a few difficulties getting the silicone to run into them. Hope you like her thus far. I will update again once I've fully assembled, painted and punched hair into the creature.

Waterlogged Corpse

After sculpting a corpse onto an old stone lifecast and making a fibreglass mould I then made a silicone bust with foam core.



The previous sculpture can be found here and the fibreglass mould making can be found here. This was an experiment with intrinsic painting and silicone pigments and although I think a number of things could be better about the finished effect there are a number of things I also quite like about it.

After finishing the sculpture and making a two part fibreglass mould I then spent some time cleaning the clay out of it. I'd advise spending some time doing this else the clay will end up on the finished product and obscure the detail that you spent time sculpting. Once this was all clean I then painted silicone, layer after layer into both halves of the mould:



I then bolted the mould back together and ran silicone through the mould to seal the silicone skin.



After doing this I created a mechanical bond so that the silicone skin would be attached to the urethane. I then set about mixing expanding urethane foam and pouring it into the mould.



WARNING: expanding urethane foams are toxic. Do not attempt this without proper masks. Make sure you are gloved, wear long sleeved clothes, sealed shoes and some kind of eye protection. Read the MDS and TDS and seek instruction.

First I poured the foam components into two separate containers, as rigid foams are not a 1:1 ratio mixture. Then I quickly mixed the foam together. I did this by hand and poured in two batches.

The foam rapidly expands and would have busted apart a mould that was not bolted together. This is also a good thing as every bit of the cavity in the head was filled up with foam. Alana took some pictures and made a short 'arty' video of the expanding foam doing its thing:



After the foam had expanded we noticed that insects were attracted to it for some reason:



The bottom bit that 'bubbled' out of the top of the mould was then hacksawed off. After doing this it is not a bad idea to seal the bottom of the foam that will face downward as bits of foam debris break off everywhere. The finished silicone bust was then pulled out of the mould. I think I could have created a mechanical bond all around the edge at the bottom of the silicone positive as it has a bit of a 'skirt' thing going on. After pulling it out I had to go buy scissors to trim the mould seam You can see the mould seam here, much better than I thought I'd get but still a mould line:



This trimming work took me some time:



After doing this I then mixed up a small batch of silicone and brushed it along the mould seam on the silicone corpse bust. Then I brushed the silicone with a couple of smoothing and dulling agents to blend it in with the existing silicone. Then finally viola!



Actually all up it took me a fair bit of time to do this, as well as a lot of learning, practice and research. Counting sculpting, mould making, cleanup, painting in silicone, pouring foam then seaming it took me ten days to get this done, but worth it because of what I learned along the way!



Hope you like it!

Throat Prop: part 5 finished painting!

Yesterday I finished painting the prop I've been working on with a combination of hand painting and airbrushing. It needed a variety of colours, from pinks to reds to browns to blues and purples to make it look right, as the block basecoat was far too homogenous. I thinned down the acrylics I had bought with some water to run them through the airbrush and this worked really well. Today I applied two coats of varnish which gives it a nice sheen and with lubricant this should achieve a nice wet look.

Painted but not airbrushed:



Airbrushed:



Right cheek and uvula:



Left cheek and uvula:




Finished throat:



[Time spent painting and airbrushing 4hrs. Total time: 34hrs! eek!]

Throat Prop: part 4 resurfacing and painting

Yesterday I spent the day resurfacing, sanding and priming the throat prop. Basically it was a process of painting layers of plaster onto the interior surface and then gently sanding this back to give as smooth a finish as possible. Then a number of coats of white primer so that the acyrlics will have a good surface to stick to. The prop is now smooth on the interior surface. Here is what it looked like at the end this process:



This morning I spent getting a good coverage in a nice fleshy pink colour:



Fully basecoated in fleshy pink:



I'll have to spend some more time painting this and putting more colours and shades into the prop to get the effect of capillaries, veins and the different colours which make up human flesh tones. Including a few shades of pink, red, purple and even a little blue. As it looks a bit too uniform at the moment. I've decided not to airbrush as orginally planned due to cost and time needed. Then I'll varnish and lubricate on set to get the wet fleshy effect needed for the shot. I'm now pretty confident that the shot should work as needed!

[Total time spent today: 4hrs]

Throat Prop: part 2 uvula and tongue armature

One of the specifications of the throat prop I'm making is to have an odometer in the uvula. Lisa (the director) came up with a brilliant and cheap solution to the numbers in the uvula problem and came over today and dropped off a counter/clicker. Like the ones used at nightclubs where the young people hang out... Made my life building this thing so much easier! The help was very much appreciated! Here are the parts unassembled:



I built some housing out of sheet styrene to fit the counter/clicker in nicely.



I also started to form the tongue out of more mesh and cut a hole in the top of the prop, so the uvula inside and clicker will be accessible.




This morning I made a visit to Barnes and got some Gypsona bandages ($66) and at the end of the day I made a return trip to the hardware store and bought some primer, solvent and sandpaper ($35.40). This bought my total spend for this build to $177.15. I think I'll be able to get away without buying more sheet styrene as I found just enough to use to build housing for clicker/counter, but I still need to buy lubricant for slippery look and some paints to airbrush the finishing coat onto the prop, especially when quite a close up shot is needed.

[Today I spent 1hr getting stuff from Barnes, 1hr getting stuff from hardware store and 4hrs playing about with wire, this brings my total hours thus far spent on this prop to 18. I'm so curious as how long this would take in terms of hours needed to make similar things on future projects and as an idea about what would be the billable hours for something like this.]

Throat Prop: part 1 procurement and wire armature

I've been asked to make a throat prop by Lisa Kappel for her VCA short film Wordless. After meeting with Lisa and discussing the build it was a bit more complex than I first imagined, which made me worried because of the time frame for completion. Anyway, the build I'm now doing is a little bit different from what was originally hoped for, but hopefully should achieve the same result.

In an ideal world with lots of time and money the prop would first be a sculpt out of clay then fabricated in fibreglass in silicone. We've opted for a cheaper build made out of wire mesh and plaster bandages.

Today I bought some of the materials needed, got some others out of storage and collected the tools I thought I might use. I also started some work on making the form out of wire armature for the throat.



A trip to Mitre 10 got me wire netting ($23) and new wire cutters ($27). And I forgot to buy sandpaper from the hardware store while I was there... A trip to Kmart got me some glue ($5.50). After some thinking in Dean's Arts I opted for Matisse's range of acrylic paints: 250ml Titanium White ($14.70), 250ml Light Skin Tone ($14.70), 75ml Prussian Blue ($7.10) and 75ml Napthol Crimson ($10.75). This should give me a good range of colours for painting the base coat and some capillaries. Probably could have also bought some black paint for back of throat. Total spend thus far, not counting wire cutters and armature wire from storage: $75.75!

I then set about forming the shape of a throat. Wire mesh armature is a bit trickier to work with than it looks and I scratched my arms and hand a bit before I remembered the gloves I had (old gardening ones which are not ideal but do the job). First the wire form is pretty floppy until I added progressive layers of wire mesh and tied it together with bits of armature wire. After wrestling with wire for a bit I had some basic shape that resembles a throat - minus uvula (dangly bit at top) and tongue.



After I had some basic shape I went and looked at some images of throats. Then I went back and added some further form to the sides of the opening to the throat.



I still have to source some more materials and will post updates as it takes shape over coming days.

[I'm also really curious how much time this build is going to take me for future reference if I have to think about doing something similar to this again. Total time thus far involved in build: 4hrs quotes for materials, 2 hrs meeting, 2 hrs communication about build, 1.5hrs procurement, 2.5hrs work on wire armature = 12hrs]