Casting the arms and legs

Unlike the head and torso, the silicone will be brushed in the arms and legs and then filled with rigid expanding foam. Here's a photo of the leg mould sections after the silicone had been applied. I imbedded strips of material into the surface of the thickened layer of silicone so this will bond to the foam.

I did the same for the arm moulds apart from also adding in a piece of thick armature wire, also wrapped in material, attached to some thinner armature wire for each finger. These wires fitted into the channels in the moulds' flanges. I also placed these thin wires into the toes of the feet as well before attaching them to the leg mould. This will mean I'll be able to adjust the position of the fingers/toes, it will also make them easier to paint evenly.

I have to wait until I have access to the workshop at uni in order to cast the foam into these moulds - I'm only able to do small urethane castings in my kitchen because of the lack of extraction!

Casting the head and torso

Today I began casting out the head and torso. I made a GRP core for this section a couple of weeks ago so I will be pouring my Platgel 10 into the cavity via a pour tube. Normally the pour tube would be attached into the core so there wouldn't be any excess silicone visible on the outside (visible) part of the cast. But in this case, I'll be taking advantage of the round hole made in my outer mould from the scaffolding pole that was holding the sculpt up on the table (see previous posts on the armature and sculpting processes).

The excess silicone left in the pour tube will be trimmed back, disguised during the seaming process and eventually covered in hair.

After drilling some bleeders to allow air to escape from the cavity, I filled each ear with silicone and let them totally cure before putting the core and mould together. This was just to make sure the ears filled properly - because of their complex shape, there was lots of areas for the air to get trapped if they had been filled up at the same time as the rest of the cast.

This image was taken just after I'd finished pouring the silicone. You can see how the Platgel has made it to all of the bleed holes and the next image shows air bubbles in the silicone rising out of the bleeders as well.

After the silicone was fully cured (checking the state of the exposed Platgel in the funnel), the funnel and tube was removed, the excess silicone was cut down to ease de-moulding. I decided to de-mould the face first - because of the slight translucency of the GRP mould, it's possible to see the pinkiness of the Platgel from the outside. This was useful when pouring the silicone because I could see where it was travelling through and filling the mould. I made sure to take the screws out of the eye blanks and teeth unit so they didn't get yanked out of the face when de-moulding - they might've actually stopped me from being able to take the mould off the face.

The chest and neck piece of the mould was the last piece to remove but because of the vacuum created by the silicone I had to split the Platgel skin up the back with a scalpel and use the core to push the chest piece away. This is why I created keys in the core so if I needed to do this, the silicone skin could locate back onto the core perfectly. Here are images of the head and torso straight out the mould...

Translucency and flocking tests

I want to make sure my silicone is as much like real skin as possible so when it comes to painting it I already have a really good base tone and translucency. I also had access to several different shades of flock. Normally it is only necessary to have red, blue and yellow shades to create different variations and out of the samples I found in the studio, I only ended up using the short strand red flock to get the desired shade.
Here's my silicone test tiles (cast from an existing fastcast mould of some skin texture). From L to R: over-exaggerated red tone, light flock density, heavy flock density, under pigmented sample, first pigment test of A+B batch, second pigment test of A+B batch after changes.

The bottom right sample is the translucency that I went with in the end - I used a black spot drawn on a tongue depressor to test how translucent the silicone is compared to actual skin. A consistently effective method practiced by Neill Gorton. I added a medium dense mix of red flock which warmed up the tone some more. I'm happy with how it looks on the depressor and in the bucket so I'm now ready to start casting out parts...