During this course we had an opportunity to work with Dave Bonnywell, a makeup artist who has worked on films such as Hellboy 2 and tv shows like Dr.Who. As part of the module he taught us how to make a partial face prosthetic, the brief was to make a partial face prosthetic based on mutation. After seeing a pretty cool picture of a mutation prosthetic i decided i wanted to try and make a cleft lip prosthetic.
I started by designing what i was going to do:
Then i partnered up with my friend Jade and cast her face in alginate and made a plaster positive of it.
After that I smoothed any undercuts away by smearing wet clay around the base and shaped some edges. Then I made a mould of the face using silicone.
I then cast the face in resin and started sculpting on the resin positive using monster clay.
I got some really good tips from Dave about sculpting, such as how to make more convincing skin texture and how to make the edges smoother. It was a really good experience and i learned a lot about sculpting and what tools are best to use for what lines etc.
Once the sculpt was done I drilled holes in the resin positive to act as keys and then did the flashing around the sculpt out of chavant soft clay.
Then i built a clay wall around it and poured in more resin to make the other half of the two part mould.
When the resin had cured i tore down the wall and removed the second half and cleaned it out of all the clay.
The mould was then sanded down and cut so that it fit nicely together.
I then filled the mould with silicone after brushing on a few layers of Bald cap plastic and clamped it together for about an hour and a half.
The first one did not come out well as the cap plastic didnt stick properly together so the silicone was not encapsulated and it was too thick. I ran it again with more vaseline to lubricate the mould better and painted on less cap plastic. i also tightened the clamp to make sure that the plastic stuck together properly.
This prosthetic worked out better so i thought id practice applying it. Unfortunately my painting skills are not amazing so i had a lot of help from Dave, he gave me some tips about painting that really helped.
I think that for a first prosthetic it went quite well, i just need to practice painting more and keep running the prosthetic to get my edges looking better. I had a lot of fun on this project and i learnt a lot, Im looking forward to trying this again soon.