Saturday 28 July 2012

Make it Coe...

Or not. Well, that didn't go as planned. The mould was pretty much a disaster. Loads of air bubbles in the plaster; half the mouth was obliterated, for example, and bubbles elsewhere resulted in what looked like huge bubos on the latex castings. I managed to bodge several repairs, but not very effectively. And the method itself is lacking. It's very difficult to make decent latex skin castings because one needs to keep the mould closed with the armature inside. Carefully and gradually pouring latex into the mould halves before clamping them together helps, but is far from perfect; and getting the liquid foam mixture to fill all hollows inside before it froths up is also very unpredictable. This latter factor is vital because it is necessary for the armature wires for the jaws to be thoroughly embedded in the foam, otherwise they detach with handling from the latex skin thus making animating the mouth impossible. The whole process is fundamentally nigh on impossible to control effectively. In an ideal world I would make the heads from foam latex or, a distant second, silicone rubber.

Nevertheless, despite all these caveats, three attempts at casting have seen successive improvements. Below you can see the third casting, painted with PAX paint and modelmaker's acrylics. Quite apart from the deficient casting (all those semi-bodged repairs), it's not a brilliant paintjob (I've put off the eyebrows as they're a bastard to do, one tiny slip and you're fucked) and the eyes are just unmarked white beads for now, but it's showing promise and is a useful testbed.


Saturday 14 July 2012

More Coe

You can see the latest progress on the Seb Coe sculpture below. I shall start mouldmaking soon...



Sunday 8 July 2012

Some other fucker...

This time it's Sebastian Coe, or Lord Coe of Locog, the bloodsucking bastards who run the Olympics. I shan't say any more at this time, other than to point out that the sculpture isn't yet finished, but the overall form is there and shouldn't change much when final detailing is added. The teeth will be made and cast separately, as to have sculpted them in situ would have obstructed the mouth and would cause problems when mouldmaking and casting later.


Okay, I lied when I said the overall form wouldn't change much - here it is after more work on the hair, which I felt looked too much like Simon Cowell's rancid flat-top barnet before (see above).


Saturday 9 June 2012

Animated Caricatures

After many many months a new post! And this time something properly related to animation, rather than miniature visual effects! It's actually more or less a repeat of my other blog McTodd Caricatures! and is pretty much simply an excuse to update this bloody thing after such a long interval...

Anyway, I'm working on sculpting plasticine masters for what will become cast latex-and-urethane-foam stopmotion animation puppets of famous figures in the public eye which will feature in short animated sketches. First up are Tory ventriloquist-dummy lookalike Education Secretary Michael Gove and slapheaded LibDem fig-leaf of integrity Business Secretary Vince Cable: