Neill Gorton's Prosthetics Course: Week 1-2

Currently I'm in the UK and two weeks into Neill Gorton's prosthetics and animatronics course!  I've now also traveled as far as I have ever gone in my life before! After a 24 hour flight from Melbourne I touched down in Heathrow, London, 6.30 Sunday morning.  I then had a bit of an epic train and bus trip out to Chesham because of engineering works on the line.  Arrival time in Chesham: 12.30.  I then managed to stay awake until 8pm, as part of my cunning plan to get my body into sync with the new timezone. That sort of half worked.  Groggy from jetlag and deliriously tired I then leaped (or should that be limped?) into the first week of the course!

The studio is about a 30 minute walk from where I'm staying, so I'll be getting some good incidental exercise getting there each day.  I was greeted by the talented Dave Bonnywell and the other students upon arrival at Unit 9 of Millenium FX.  There are five other talented artists doing the course, some from the UK, one from Portugal and another from Turkey.  So a truly international group of artists. I worked out I'd probably be fine on most of the technical stuff, but I certainly feel a bit out of my league artistically.  After a bit of a meet and greet, Neill Gorton took us for our first day (before handing over to Dave) doing a character sculpting demo mash-up of a gorilla into troll.

We then jumped straight into sculpting a human bust, copying a lifecast.  This was a good exercise to start with and Dave got us focused on paying attention to what is really there.  I've tried doing one anatomical-realistic bust sculpture before this and it was great to have a very good sculptor prodding me to make changes and where to focus my attentions to develop the form. Whereas when I was sculpting by myself, I've tended to get a bit lost at moments, thinking that something isn't right, but not being entirely sure what precisely to change.  I think I've already improved my sculpting a lot after a mere two weeks of doing the course.  Shows what some professional instruction can do eh?  We'll keep working on the bust sculpt on and off throughout the course and I hope to mold mine and cast a silicone bust out of it and maybe get another portfolio piece out of this exercise.  It's a bit of a luxury having a much longer time to work on a sculpture than we've had in the past when working on short films.

Also during the first week we sculpted, molded and applied some flat-bed prosthetics.  I've sculpted cuts and bite wounds before so I decided to sculpt a single barrel shot-gun blast.  And while I've applied silicone encapsulated prosthetics before, I haven't applied these as transfers, using the actual mould as an application tool!  Sounds wacky, but it works. You apply prosaide to the back of the mold and to your victim and this pulls the piece out of the mold and into place.  I learned from the exercise that its better to have a really thin silicone mold.  I wasn't 100% happy with the application or the shape of the piece: I got air trapped under a portion and I think its a bit circular so the edge still reads a bit and gives the piece away.  With some paint and a blood application it's not terrible but its far from perfect. The following images are of Dave doing an application demo, my sculpt and my finished application.

After this we got straight into lifecasting other class members, casting positives in soft plaster (whereas prior to this I've either used much harder Ultracal 30 or Hydrocal) and cleaning them up with our sculpting tools.

While we lifecast other people, we had to clean up and master mould our own faces in silicone and fibreglass.  After this we handed them over to other people to cast either urethane or fibreglass positives out of for our next assignment of creating snap moulds or two part fibreglass moulds

My decision for the next prosthetic piece is based on the feedback I've got from people looking at my portfolio: more realistic/anatomical and subtle work.  So I've chosen to make a subtle nose piece that will shift Lucy towards a more Semitic look.  But being me I've also decided to sculpt and cast something much more out there: an alien plant suckered into a person's face and growing out of their mouth, which I'll run in foam latex instead of encapsulated silicone!

This weekend I'm in planning and design phase for my final portfolio piece which will be put together over the last four weeks of the course. I'll try and blog that week by week as I go but I think it could be once a fortnight, but it depends on how much energy I have at the end of each week.