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Xelibri is a company that manufactures high-fashion interchangeable mobile phone covers, or ‘skins’. Opting for an eye-catching variation on this theme, their marketing people had devised a photo campaign depicting body-beautiful human skins hanging in a wardrobe, as if waiting to be worn. Ed Gein was sadly unavailable, so it fell to The Millennium FX All-Stars to come up these skin-suit husks for the shoot. Proceed!
We needed to supply both male and female versions, so the plan was to make full-body lifecasts of tall glamorous people of each sex and then work through the process of casting in plastiline, moulding in fibreglass and recasting in rubber to arrive at the final skins. Tall glamorous people? Suppose that means a phone call to an outside modelling agency then.
The two models recruited were lifecast using alginate backed up with plaster bandage jackets. “So how was work today?” “Ahh, you know, the usual… smearing pink paste over naked people.” It’s not unheard of to make one single collarbone-to-feet impression of a subject, but it was more manageable for us to break everything down into parts: separate casts for the head, arms, front torso, back torso and legs. Millennium FX boss Neill Gorton oversaw the whole job. Neill co-supervised the corpse-happy likes of Saving Private Ryan and From Hell, so this stuff is as familiar to him as a Bank Holiday re-run of Dad’s Army.
The resulting alginate–and-plaster-bandage moulds had a decent thickness of molten plastiline (oil-based clay) swilled round inside them, and then the procedure of piecing the bodies together could begin. My drawing skills are marginally better than my powers of description, so take a look below:
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Assembling a full-size plastiline figure from a lifecasting session Starting with the alginate-and-bandage leg moulds with a skin of plastiline lining the inside: metal poles are set into the leg cavities and secured by filling up the remaining space with biscuit foam. This is a two-part rigid expanding foam that sets to the consistency of croutons (for the want of a better description!). It’s ideal for this kind of gig, because it forms a surface sturdy enough to support a mass of clay, but also one that can be easily cut back with a serrated kitchen knife should revisions need to be made. Smooth-On’s Foam-iT! 5 is an example. |
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A Kee clamp scaffold socket is bolted to a wooden board. This board is then fibreglassed firmly to the poles sticking out of the top of the legs. |
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The socket is attached to a scaffold rig strong enough to eventually support the entire figure’s weight. Now that the legs aren’t likely to go anywhere, the alginate and plaster bandage can come off. |
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The plastiline of the front torso is held in position and more biscuit foam is poured between it and the board to bind them together. The progress of the foam can be contained by winding clingfilm around any gaps you don’t want it to escape out of. |
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The arms receive the same treatment as the legs: the plastiline is reinforced with metal rod and foam and the rod secured to the board. |
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The plastiline back section completes the torso, held in place by more biscuit foam poured into the neck opening. The foam-filled plastiline head tops things off.
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And yes, I am the Eleventh-Dan, triple-crowned king of Pictionary. Search your feelings, you know it to be true.
Once all the body parts had been safely assembled as shown, me and Ian Morse applied ourselves to cleaning up the girl and Neil Morrill and Claire Folkard worked on the male figure. Steve Scotton and Conal Palmer helped out on both as the day of reckoning loomed closer.
Normally these lifecast-based projects don’t require you to expend too much of your sculpting chi beyond blending away the joins and tidying up any imperfections. However, the agency wanted a slightly different body type for the female form, entailing some chopping and changing on our part. The picture on the right shows the end result: the head, arms and legs belong to our model Hannah, whilst the torso bears traces of me and Morsey’s grubby-fingered handiwork.
With the plastiline work completed, the next task was make multi-piece fibreglass moulds of the sculptures. Strangely, one of the most murderous parts of this job sounds like the most straightforward: getting the completed mould shells off the figures for use. It took Neil M. and me a whole Sunday afternoon (and everything short of a JCB and a wrecking ball) to prise all the different bits apart. The pieces weren’t held by anything except a vacuum, but I suppose we were just dealing with such large surface areas that it caused everything to be locked together with an almighty vengeance. Whatever, the circus was definitely in town that day… just swap the custard pies and soda siphons for two full-sized fibreglass body moulds.
Next:
what are you going to do with a couple of finished moulds except throw
some rubber into them? In this instance, Jacobson’s C204 silicone
tinted to a flesh tone.
Pre- colouring silicone rubber to a skin tone
I’ve found that the easiest way to get a good flesh effect with silicone is to add only white paint to begin with, and concentrate on just getting the translucency right first. Want to know a sure-fire way of getting your silicone to the correct translucency to mimic human skin? The vital piece of equipment is... a wooden mixing stick with a black dot drawn on it with marker pen!
Begin by adding your white oil colour to the rubber a little at a time and stirring it in. Then, at intervals, take your patented translucency-testing stick and scoop it through the silicone. Let the rubber drain off the stick and watch out for that black dot. If it’s visible through more than about 3mm of rubber, the mix is too translucent and needs more colour through it. Simple, no? Once that element is working, add burnt sienna, cadmium red, yellow ochre, ultramarine blue and so on to the mix to get the final skin colour.
Enough of the textbook methods, and back to the guerrilla tactics. The ‘proper’ way of producing a skin of even thickness is to make a core that sits inside your mould and creates a uniform space to be occupied by the rubber. If we’d had a schedule stretching before us like the endless golden sands of a
tropical beach, I dare say we’d’ve done exactly that. As it was, we just painted the silicone into the individual mould parts in layers, bolted everything together and ran a final batch of rubber around the joins.
As you can see from the picture, this method worked out fine… although industry pundits might notice that I photographed the figures head-on to shield you from seeing the mould flashing along the sides. Mama Carruthers didn’t raise no fool. So the final lap was to nurse those pesky seams back from death’s door and add some colour detail to each skin with silicone pigments and paint base. |
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