Mask Creation

Finally getting round to making my mask after a long time of coming up with a design. Before hand I had started to give a plaster cast head a layer of chavant clay which is like a harder Plasticine. Next was bulking out the exaggerated facial features that my mask was going to have based on the research I had carried out. 

Using a heat gun to soften the chavant I then used various sculpting tools to smooth and mold my sculpt.

Here I've started to mark out the hair line and the horn positioning I'm very slightly struggling with symmetry but I think I'm getting there. Looking at pictures and holding the sculpt at certain angles helps.

I built up features like hair and the mustache with sausages of chavant that I blended in using a tool. 

once I was happy with my sculpt I built a clay wall around the bottom of the sculpt so the silicone wouldn't run off.

I wrapped the clay in a damp cloth to keep it soft over the weekend.

Sadly when I got back to it the clay had dried and fallen off so to make sure it wouldn't happen again I decided to make my wall out of chavant. This took some time as the chavant was a lot harder to cut and get into place.

The first layer of silicone was used to capture all of the detail in the sculpt. The only downside is that you don't put thickener in this layer so when I came back to it the next day a considerable amount of silicone had run off of the mask.

The next layer was much better as I added a thickener so it stayed o the sculpt a lot better. I cut up dried pieces of silicone to act as keys so my modroc jacket would have something to cling on to when it came to casting.

The sculpt is split into three sections so it'll be easy to remove the modroc jacket.

Make sure to build up walls down the edges of your jacket so you can screw the pieces together once everything has been taken off of the plaster head.

This is what I was left with after removing the silicone.

I used a drill to make some holes along the edges of my jacket and put screws in to hold the silicone skin in place.

Putting the resin into the mold was fairly straight forward. Mix equal parts of each of the white containers, this will dry and form the resin, stir well and pour into the mold. I moved the resin around as it hardened to make sure I covered all of the details.

This was done several times until I got the desired thickness.

Using a dremel I trimmed off all raw edges and sanded down any really thick areas.

I primed it ready for painting an sprayed it black.

I dulled down the gloss coat with sand paper to prepare for more paint.

I dabbed the mask with brown and black paint which I then wiped with red paint to give it a bronze look.

Finally I finished it off b mixing green with white to create the bright green rust that forms on copper and bronze.