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The brief for this modelmaking job was to produce a dozen or so realistic silicone figures to stand in Puma sportwear’s flagship shops around the world. In short, this involved lifecasting male and female models, creating plastiline sculptures of them, moulding these and then duplicating them in silicone rubber. Imagine a fifty-foot version of this chasing you down the high street… Yeah… if you happened to read the previous article about the work we did at Millennium FX for the Xelibri ad, this will all probably sound eerily familiar. In fact, it was my write-up of that earlier job that went some way to securing me a position on this project. Perhaps the planets were in alignment or something. "Scorpio: unsettling-looking rubber people will feature prominently in your life over the next few months…” To be honest, this Puma assignment was so similar to the Xelibri gig that the repetition would probably bore you (and me) stupid if I recounted the whole process from beginning to end. (If you’re desperately interested, there’s a little bit about it in the Gallery section.) Instead, I’m going to focus on one part of the job: how the silicone was painted to create a human skin effect. Silicone + forearm hair = BAD, BAD NEWS First the silicone was pre-coloured to a realistic translucent skin tone using the methods described here.Two things I’ve learnt about uncatalysed silicone: (i) once it splashes onto your clothes, it doesn’t want to come off; (ii) it then acts as a magnet for every last bit of dirt and grime in the workshop. So, after a few days of furiously mixing in paint, my outward appearance was… distinctive. I’m sure my housemates thought that all my talk about working in special effects was lies, and that I really spent my days on a sewage farm or something. Once the rubber was the right colour, we poured it into the moulds we’d prepared and let it set, to produce our silicone figures. It sounds easy when you put it like that. Next, painting. I’d bought a new digital camera and was in snap-happy mood the day I artworked one of the overseas heads, so I can show you photos of every step of the process. I know, you’re a-quiver with indifference. Painting a realistic skin effect • Here’s the head about to be painted. Check out the pale, bloodless tone I chose to make the rubber. Painting silicone is a bit like doing watercolour work – you want the base tone to be the lightest colour that’s going to be seen. Then you use washes of transparent paint to darken it, warm it up, etc. (You don’t want to have to add a lighter tone or use any white in with your paint because this kills the translucency.) Anyway, the first step is to wash the head down with toluene to give a nice grease-free surface. It's worth stressing: without the protection of a proper facemask, the vapours many of these solvents give off are extremely friggin' detrimental to your health! It’s chemical warfare out there, and if you spend your working life hoovering these products up you may not see the day when you’re playing frisbee in the park in your grandkids. Put it this way – my wages from this job went straight onto nice, safe computer graphics kit. • What you see here is my favourite painting brush, a.k.a. Excalibur. It’s true, ragged old art brushes that’d be useless for anything else actually work really well for painting skin effects. I used Excalibur to paint all the This Little Life babies, the Jack+Vincent+Arnie lifecasts in the Gallery, and more besides. • This isn’t the best photo to illustrate it, but what I’ve done here is airbrushed on a nice healthy Californian tan colour. The paint’s heavier on the cheeks, the back of the neck and around the hairline, and lighter on the ears. Listen, just pretend you can see it. I’m painting everything with regular artist’s oil paints, but with the added bonus of Dow Corning 785 clear silicone sealant heavily thinned with white spirit. This helps bind the pigments to the rubber. It’s easiest to prepare enough sealant-and-white-spirit solution for the entire paint job, and then suck it up into a syringe. Then you can mix up your oil paints as normal, squirt in a dash from the syringe, and you’re ready to go. • The airbrush goes away and Excalibur comes out of its scabbard. First up is a reddish-purple colour (made by mixing cadmium red, purple madder and burnt sienna). This goes on the lips, nose, cheeks, chin, around the eyes and ears, and on the throat to give a mild ‘razor burn’ effect. The colour is applied by dipping only the tip of the brush into the paint, wiping the bristles semi-dry, and then putting the paint on with a dabbing action. Thanks to ol’ Excalibur’s split ends, this results in a nice, random, organic mottling that breaks up the blank and plasticky look of the rubber. • Next, I’m putting on a dull blue colour (made by mixing ultramarine blue and burnt sienna together, and slightly favouring the blue). This goes around the eye sockets, the wings of the nostrils, the inner ears and the edges of the lips. I’ve used the same paint to simulate beard stubble. The proper, proper way of doing this is to actually insert each hair for real, one follicle at a time. There was a replica dummy of a skinhead character on Blade II that had a full, bouffant head of hair laboriously punched into its scalp, only to have it completely shaved off again. The person who punched in the hair must've had tears in their eyes when the clippers were fired up. Anyway, as you can see, the mighty Excalibur can cheat a decent second-best with just paint alone, and saves us enough time to allow us to eat and sleep. • Now I’m using a warm yellow/brown colour (made by mixing yellow ochre and purple madder) to add a bit of freckling and subtly accentuate the creases on the forehead and around the eyes and mouth. • As a final tweak, I’ve run a wash of olive green around the jawline to help sell the stubble effect. He’s also looking a little shiny, but a dusting with talc will straighten that out. • Job done. He’s now ready to go to the hair department. Stick the kettle on. For some reason I prefer the look of this head without the fake eyes, but here’s a shot for all you completists.
		Left: the ‘dry-run’ test head I worked on before the painting proper began. More Right: One of the female heads I painted. You’ll notice that I eased back on the beard stubble for this one.
One day, my girl Ida wanted to pay a visit to the workshop in North Wembley to see where the hell I’d been spending all my time. She didn’t know what building we were in, so I said I’d come out into the street and find her so that she didn’t get lost. I’d just finished painting this pair of hands, so, as a joke, I pulled my own hands inside my coat sleeves, held the fake hands where my real ones should be and went out to greet her. It got to the point where I was actually stroking her face with these crazy rubber hands and she still hadn’t noticed anything unusual. So that was a good demonstration that they could pass for the real thing. (The fact that Ida couldn’t differentiate between my own tender caresses and the cold, dead touch of silicone is maybe a little more troubling, but there ya go…)
			Yet more fake-o-flesh.
Someone enquired via email about the specifics of manufacturing these figures. How did we get it so that we had an even thickness of silicone 'skin' supported by a fibreglass understructure? The trick is to make what's known in the trade as a core. I was feeling particularly inarticulate the day this question came through, so I drew this explanatory diagram instead: Bear in mind that I doodled all this during an idle lunch hour, so the quality of presentation might not be up to par with the rest of the site. Why do I get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that you won't be able to tell the difference? To finish off, I should say that I was only one very small part of a whole big production line on this project. So, hats off to all the talented people I worked with: John Schoonraad, Sean Kelly, Angela Pang, Warwick Boole, Doug Wibden, Simon Rose, Simon Webber, Tristan Schoonraad, Jimmy Robinson, Hair Guy Dave, Alex, Frankie Johnson, Ken Lang, Steph Bell, Lauge Voigt and Thomas Foldberg. Did I forget anyone? See more Puma stuff in the Gallery
Read about previous project: Xelibri Mobile Phones Ad	Back to Behind The Scenes menu					Read about next project: Running Scared
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Creepy.