Transforming your ideas into a creative reality.
Silicone Bust Case Study
For one of my final projects in school we were tasked with creating from scratch a silicone bust in a group! My group decided to go with a grotesque mermaid with rotting sea elements. I wanted to walk you through the process, and everything that did and didn't go according to plan. He is still a work in progress and will post more when he's complete!
Concept
Planning Stages
First thing to any project is planning, planning, and more planning. Especially when you are working into a group it's important that everyone is seeing eye to eye. For our group we ended up all liking the idea of a rotting mermaid but decided to have everyone sketch out a concept and pick what parts we liked from each. This is the final concept we decided on.
Lifecasting
Molding
The next stage is getting your model and life casting them so we have a base to sculpt onto. We life casted in Alginate with a plaster bandage jacket and then poured the cast with Ultracal 30 to make a stone positive. We broke up the work by having 2 people do the mold and 2 prep including readying and soaking the bandages ect.
Sculpting
Creating Your Design
Once the cast is poured up in Ultracal 30 you can de-mold it, sand it down if you have any rough edges, and start working away on your design. We decided to have 2 group members work on sculpting the bust while the other 2 worked on sculpting accessories. It ended up taking all hands on deck to finalize our sculpt because we weren't happy with it but it got done. Above is final sculpt before molding.
Molding pt. 2
Molding the Sculpt
Once we were happy with our sculpt we molded it in Body Double with a plaster bandage jacket. Like the life-casting we broke our groups into teams to make the process go faster since you only have a certain amount of time to work with the silicone. Above is the Body Double mold without the plaster jacket.
Pouring Your Cast
Casting
Now that we have our Body Double mold we cleaned it out with 99% alcohol and poured multiple slush layers of Dragon Skin silicone. Before you do this it is incredibly important to release your mold properly especially when pouring silicone into a silicone mold. Our mold unfortunately wasn't released enough so we had to destroy part of our mold in the de-molding process. Above is our pulled silicone case once it was cleaned up.
Painting
Base Coats
To start building up the depth of the bust's skin we airbrushed multiple blue tones of Psycho Paint to add highlights and depth. Psycho Paint is great for giving you a lot of play time and when you dilute it with a solvent it works great in an airbrush so everything can be evenly applied.
Molding Accessories
Barnacles and Starfish
While the base layers of paint were being applied to the bust we had a few members of our team mold our sculpted barnacles and star fish. We molded them both in Body Double since some of them were going to be run in silicone. Once they were cast in Dragon Skin and Gel 10 we started placing them on our bust to figure our placement and what looked best together.
Adhering Elements
Attachment
Once most of the base painting was done on our bust and we were happy with the placement of our elements we started to attach them. Since they were made out of silicone as well we attached them with Smooth On's Skin Tite to help silicone stick to silicone and then pinned them in place until they fully cured.
Painting & Punching
Finer Details
When the barnacles and starfish had been successfully attached it was time for hand painting the smaller details. 2 of us started painting veining on the body and rotting tones around the barnacles with Psycho Paint. After that we began the hair punching process. Once more of this is complete we will start on adding moss, teeth and eyeballs. WIP.