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.