Finally back on the head project.
I pressed clay into the face mold. I did use a couple coats of Mann 200 release on the mold. Clay was applied thin where the eyes go then pushed in the eyeball forms and packed around those.
I kept packing the front of mold and checking my head core armature for fit. Once it was pretty well filled, I pushed the armature in place then packed clay in between the sides of mold and armature trying to lock it all together.
I put it in the fridge over night to firm up. It may have only required a couple hrs, but I was heading to bed anyway. I then took the cold assembly to the stove and slowly heated the fiberglass front up a little. My hair dryer crashed and I don't have a heat gun.
I was then able to work the clay form out of the mold. In the pic you can also see the Fiberglass neck post mold I made. The front & rear bumps on that are to index the front and rear mold halves.
I did not fill the chin section in w/ clay as that would have formed a lock between the clay and mold. If I did not have the issue w/ having to pull the clay form straight out from the mold due to the post on the eye forms, I could have possibly filled the chin area then rocked the clay form out from top to bottom. Depending upon how much help having the eye ball forms in during this process, I may just omit them next time and just add them in later.
I barely warmed the clay enough in my hand to press in and of course I used my oldest clay first which has lost some of it's oil over time and usage. If I had used warmed, new clay and taken more care of the packing, the finished clay form would have been very smooth. Live & learn. No biggie though as I plan to do mods on the face anyway. I just wanted to get a overall symmetrical form to start with.
Rather than trying to sculpt and make a mold of the entire head in one shot, I'm going to sculpt the front half and make a silicone and fiberglass mold for that. I will then flip that over and sculpt the back half and made the mold for that. And hopefully, from here on out, I can use the same rear mold half unless I change the head shape or size enough to warrant new mold halves for both sides. Might even just make the back mold fiberglass over bondo since no great detail needs to be captured.
I believe I borrowed this idea from member Toonist of Private Island Beauty fame when I saw this pic posted. I think he is using the same rear mold half and just sculpting new faces? Or at least that's what gave me the idea.
- Courtesy of PIB
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I have found the eye forms embedded a lot deeper than what I like and I needed to cut them out.
I'm going to do some mods on the face mold and the eye forms.
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OK, I ground some hollows in the mold so the eyeballs will protrude further out VS just touching the flat eye area of the original mannequin head. And now that the eyes are flusher to the surface, I used a set of eye forms that have shorter stems so that made it easier to remove the clay from the mold. I therefore added some chin area. All this was done by just adding some clay in and out of the mold a couple of time. Would have been better result possible to do it all over again, but more time. This is good enough to get me started anyway.
- IMAG0001 (5).JPG (60.21 KiB) Viewed 1239 times
Going downtown. Gonna see my gal. Gonna sing her a song. I'm gonna show her my ding dong! C&C