Big project WIP: Prosthetic casting (take one and two)

 UNFORTUNATE UPDATE: 

Due to personal reasons I cannot disclose, this project's progress has been extinguished. :(

I will be leaving this blog entry up, unaltered except for this edit, to document the progress we did make for experience/resume purposes.

We will be re-attempting this project at another time in the future, don't worry. :)

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 I'm assuming all my readers know about Orion, who is one of my close friends and in person artistic collaborator. From this post on, I'm going to assume readers know who he is, because we collaborate quite often. We're a team! :) I highly recommend checking out his Facebook page, linked above.

 Anyway! We're working a HUUUGE project. It's very ambitious. It involves very complex prosthetic costume parts. They have to be made for my specific body, so Orion is making me some custom pieces. :D It's a huge task. I had to have my face, arms, and entire torso molded. It's still a huge work in progress, but here's what we've got done so far!


  So, last Tuesday we did a cast of my face and arm using alginate. Unfortunately, it didn't go quite as we planned. Whoops! The arm cast didn't turn out, but the face cast turned out nicely! Here are some work in progress pictures. :)

I had to put my swimcap on to minimize the mess, and not get alginate in my luxurious mane.

  I was wrapped up in a very professional trash bag cocoon wrapping to try and keep as much alginate off of my clothes as possible. It didn't work as well as we planned, but helped a good bit.

  The alginate was a little bit too runny, but the face cast came out perfectly in the end. However, it was GROSS to wear. Blegh. It was room temperature at best, and slimy. Oh, and did I mention the dripping? Yep, all over my everything and up my nose. Yay. -.-  But it was worth it in the end!

  The next layer was plaster bandages, forming a hard shell, pretty much. This layer was MUCH better; I didn't mind it, because it prevented the alginate from dripping and insulated heat to keep my face warmer. There were two holes in the nostrils so I could breath through them. I look like a mummy!

  Despite the trash bag cocoon, I still got a LOT of alginate on my clothes. Blargh. However, it did jiggle, and that was pretty hilarious. :) Hahaha!




  Day two went much better! We re-did the arm cast, and this time it turned out great! I took a bunch of pictures of the arm cast, but they were all more or less the same, so here are some highlights.

 We used a lair of alginate, then a layer of plaster and plaster bandages. You can see the colour differentiation above; the alginate is lavender (much more-so in person) and the plaster is white. 

  Here are the plaster bandages; their drying time was sped up by applying a heat gun to them.

  While my arm was stuck in the box waiting for the everything to set, Orion took some of the leftover alginate that was in the bottom of another bucket (it was like cold, mildly slimy rubber) and put it on my face while I couldn't move, before I had a chance to protest. >:I  Insolence! ...It was really funny, haha. But besides that, the arm cast turned out great this time!



  We also made a cast of my torso using LOTS of layers of tape and expanding foam. I was wrapped in cellophane to prevent the tape from being directly on my skin and make removal easier (and not painful!), then layers and layers and layers of masking tape. We lost count of how many layers we did, but after we got enough, we did a layer of duct take for support, then more masking tape on top of that. Here are some pictures of a few layers!

Armor class +1

He wrote "KICK ME" on my back as he was drawing the alignment line for cutting and re-taping :I

Here is the cast after cutting it off of me :)

Orion surveying his work. ...I like how he taped it up but left the "kick me" sign.

Now he has to fill the tape cast with expanding foam. Right now the mold looks very...corpse-like. 

Here is the foam torso mannequin after its tape mold was cut off. We're going to sculpt the actual prosthetic chest piece on the foam mold, and we can re-use the mold again for future sculpting/custom costume pieces. It's not fully finished in the image above; it still needs to be sanded a bit.

And here are the results we have so far!

The torso is sanded down to size and covered in a layer of something else (I forget what!), and the face and arm are complete and ready to be sculpted on top of. :D

No, that's not supposed to be an accurate representation of how long my neck is :P He just put the face cast (that happened to have a bit of neck with it) on top of the torso mannequin. But so far, all three of the pieces turned out excellent! 

Great work, Orion! :D 

Love,

Queen Werandra