POSTING 3, 05/17/98: Finally. I've been sooooo curious about how this all fit together, and have had to wait until I could liberate the body from the clay sculpt. These are the latex castings trimmed and superglued together over a crude suit made of pantyhose. The pantyhose lets the castings ride over the body so that weird wrinkles in the castings can be manually worked out. It also serves as a surface for some of the castings to adhere to. Even though these are thin castings, some of the flexibility is lost-- most notably in the waist's side-to-side twist. The arms don't fold down to the body nearly as closely as they would with a fabric (kinda like those bodybuilder dudes). Also, because these are thin castings, some unattractive wrinkling is apparent in the thighs & arms. This would be lessened if I had planned for it and cast certain sections separately and of different thicknesses. This is still a possibility-- although the clay sculpt work is now in a zillion tiny fragments, the molds can be reused to cast the parts in different materials and in different colors. This is after all, an experiment; and I'm skeptical (with good reason) about the longevity of latex castings.
Obviously, she needs a head-- I expect that this will be the most fun part, which is why I've saved it for last. The challenge will be to come up with something that fits this weird body. I'm thinking of making the hands and feet in epoxy putty, and maybe reworking the feet for that "high-heeled troll" look (grin). I don't think I've mentioned this, but the castings are fairly crude, with lots of pinholes and imperfections. It doesn't bother me too much since there's a lot of random detail on the sculpture. But I'm curious as to how I'll fix this-- I'm thinking of brushing on that mixture of tinted latex and acrylic. The final step is to paint the sucker, and I imagine I'll use the airbrush and detailing washes. I don't know for sure what'll stick well to this and not be too glossy, so the paint scheme will probably be nothing dramatic or way beyond the green tinted base that's already there.
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POSTING 4, 05/22/98: Oooh, high contrast is soooo artsy! (It also makes the brown clay look less like a piece of chocolate.) This is maybe the third revision of the basic head design? It's not easy trying to decide how far to take it with the creature features. I want her to look human (vs. "bug-like"), and slightly evil. I'm aware that this is derivative of the Species creature, but hopefully the fetish for "bulk" will steer the design in its own direction. This head design is preliminary, since I haven't experimented with whatever head extensions she'll have. All I know is that she needs more; I'll know it when I see it. The human-like hair thing is probably not a good idea, but I haven't ruled it out. I 'm also thinking horns, leaf-scaley tentacles, or maybe an organic looking crown. They'd be added later as a separate flexible piece, since I don't want to impede any articulation. I thought it might be neat to redo this in layers-- a bony bio mechanical skull wearing the skin mask? I've always wanted to do one of those. These same "post decorating" considerations apply to the bodysuit too. Right now it looks like some kind of exotic space pajamas, but I can't take it any further until I see what the whole thing looks like.
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POSTING 5, 05/24/98: This is a boring picture of what was done to the feet & hands before covering them with epoxy putty, sculpting & painting. The final sculpting quality was pretty crummy since I rushed through this. I used 5-minute putty instead of 1-hour Milliput so that didn't leave a lot of time to do anything fancy. I'm impatient and wanted to get on with it, and figured that I could always resculpt 'em later.
As luck would have it, I used the last of my molding supplies to make the head/mask, and the mold had some major flaws on the nose, lips and cheek. Could it get any worse than this? Some of these were obvious from the mold, so I filled them with plasticene. However, you can't sculpt too well on the inside of a mold. Once I demolded the latex mask, some additional flaws were evident. Although I could have waited and made another mold (miraculously, the clay head survived the casting), I attempted to repair the latex casting by trimming the excess and filling the voids with the latex mix. Very hard to work with, since it "glumps up" (a totally cromulent phrase, y'know?). To smooth out the texture on the pitted nose, I used straight acrylic paint-- very thick. It's not perfect, but it looks a lot better.
The head is made up of that latex mask glued over a Masterpiece Edition head, and decorated with the spare castings from the arms. I experimented with poking horns through the castings, and can't decide whether I like the effect or not... I'm pretty set on the tentacled "pigtails" though. They're wired so they can be positioned, Gumby-like. The "ponytail" in the back isn't wired, and a long prefab hose hangs from it and terminates in a stinger. It looks sort of like a tail.
At this time, I haven't really painted it, other than a little bit on the face. I sort of like the look of the raw castings.
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