Teeth 3

Today I cast out the final set of teeth. I used a dental acrylic kit from 'M R Dental' and chose a pre-coloured powder (pink) to go with the liquid monomer because I knew I would only be using the acrylic for the gums. Pictured below was my set up:

I chose a cold cure acrylic which means it does not need to be cast under a controlled heat whilst also under pressure (I would need an autoclave for this). I used a hydraulic pressure pot which was recommended to me by Darren and another industry professional to use for this purpose. I set up in our uni's polyester resin room which had the best ventilation and was wearing gloves and a respirator throughout. The photos below show an all-pink acrylic tester I did to practice with the material and one of the original gum sculpts with the teeth taken out and 'glued' into it's mould with tiny amounts of vaseline. The teeth are also acrylic, so they stayed imbedded in the acrylic gums (which means one chance to get them right!):

 

The next photos show me mixing the acrylic, pouring it into the mould (with the teeth imbedded), the mould in the pressure pot chamber after the acrylic had reached it's snap cure making it ready to be put in water and before the lid and pressure was put on. The last photo shows one half of the final set after de-moulding, they were ready to de-mould after roughly 20 min...

These teeth will now be put aside until the last minute, then they'll be coloured up and inserted into the model at the same time as the glass eyes.

Teeth 2

Pictures below are the moulds for my teeth with the original sculpts pulled out- I'm going to leave the teeth in the sculpted gums until they need to be embedded into the moulds so I don't loose them or forget what order / position they're in. I then made blanks of the teeth from fast cast, with a bit of tweaking, these will go into the Kijimuna sculpt to be sculpted around and will be screwed into the inside of the fibreglass mould like the eyes.

Instead of having to integrate an additional silicone plug into the mould to stop the Platgel from filling up the mouth cavity, I decided to make the mouth cavity and the teeth into one solid unit so it is easier to build the inside core around and so I don't have to worry about the Platgel sticking to the silicone plug (which would also have to be a platinum silicone!). I fixed the teeth into a slightly open position that I was happy with and filled in the gap with filler and Milliput, It was difficult to imagine what shape to make the cavity because I am essentially sculpting a negative space, but I remembered to leave the top and bottom of the teeth blanks clear so there will be a recess in the mouth where the real teeth can glue into. I also think the teeth will be open enough to warrant making a tongue to go inside...

Teeth!

So after deciding to have mostly human-looking teeth, I bought some loose acrylic ones off eBay to use to assemble my own upper and lower sets. I haven't properly scheduled the making of the teeth into the project so I figured sculpting the gums would be challenging enough let alone attempting to sculpt replicas of actual teeth - in industry the teeth (if close to a humans') would most likely be bought and then adapted to a fit a design anyway.

My friend Darren Grassby is a dental lab technician based in Bradford, he produces false teeth and dentures for FX purposes in his own time, has worked on teeth for Harry Potter and gave me some tips on the processes involved in making a set of good teeth (dentures or otherwise). Using the correct materials is important for getting the right look so I have ordered a kit of dental acrylic (pink powder and liquid monomer) to cast the gums in. He lent me a set of his own teeth to look at and I used these as reference when sculpting gums for my teeth. I considered using dental wax to sculpt the gums, pictured below (this is used often by dental technicians) but I am unfamiliar sculpting with this and decided the properties of Monster Clay would work in a similar way.

Pictured above is a collection of the teeth I bought pushed into some plasteline just to give me an idea of what order I wanted them to be in and what shades I wanted to use. Pictured below is the finished set of gums with the chosen teeth implanted. I made moulds of these this afternoon and will demould tomorrow.

Pose sketch-overs

As well as moulding the teeth, today I printed out my favourite 6 poses (3 standing, 3 sitting/kneeling) and drew the details of the Kijimuna over them to give myself a better idea of what it would look like in each stance. I then went round the studio asking lots of people which one looked the best / was most dynamic / was most in the Kijimuna's character. A lot of people chose the one I had really liked (the first sitting pose) and although it seems like the hardest one to mould, it is by far the one that best reflects the Kijimuna's child-like personality.

I will now scale up this sketch to get an idea of the size of my final model...

Pose variations

Today I took the plasteline figure from before and bent it into different possible positions that I could present the final model in. My drawing skills aren't developed enough to be able to brainstorm different stances on paper so I thought doing it through photography would work just as well. These were the ones I came up with:

They're kind of in an order from standing to sitting and it's hard to work some of them out due to the fact this model doesn't have hands or proper feet. Annoyingly, I prefer a lot of the sitting positions to the standing ones, it seems more in the Kijimuna's character that it would crouch close to the ground whilst picking at their catch of fish. I say annoyingly because this could potentially make my final model much more difficult to mould. I'm quite confident I could produce a more complex mould but it's more to do with the extra time it might take. I hope to pick my favourite poses out of these and draw over them to get a better idea of what the final model could potentially look like...