Tuesday, March 5, 2013

working with Liquid neoprene part 2 (wall mask)

Ok this is the second large piece I have done using Liquid neoprene. In this case I wanted to make a larger mask that is going to be used as part of a wall piece.  I started by sculpting the mask over a plaster form I had cast.  I sculpted it out of water based ceramic clay.  Once I had the clay mask sculpted I made mold out of Hydro Cal and let it cure.  Once it was cure ( about an hour) I cleaned out the clay and let the mold dry for a couple days. Now on this mask I intentionally did not sculpt a lot of detail in to the clay because I wanted to play with adding more detail with the neoprene.  Here is the mold.




As you can see it is very simple. What does not come across in the picture is how big it is.  The mold is just over 17 inches from top to bottom now Neoprene shrinks as it dries so the casting will be about 10% smaller.  With the mold being this big it took almost a full gallon of neoprene to fill it.  I filled the mold and let it set for about 4-5 hours because I wanted a  nice thick casting to work with. After the time was up I poured out the excess neoprene and let it dry.  After drying about 8 hours the neoprene had dried and shrunk enough that I could remove from the mold but is was still soft so I let the mask set in the mold over night. Then I hug it on my wall for a couple days to completely firm up.   In the end the mask ended up being about 15 3/7 inches from top to bottom and 3/16 - 1/4 inch thick.  Now if this was going to be a wearable mask I would not want it to be thicker than 1/8 at this thick it would be very heavy to wear.  Since I am planing on this being a piece just to hang on the wall I am not worried if it is a little thick and by the time I am done it will be even thicker.
Ok here is the mask now I have added lots of texture in a couple different ways and I have started coating it with black neoprene.  Let me talk about what I did and why.  Ok the first thing I did was add some more details and wrinkles with black neoprene roofing caulk.  I got the caulk from the local hardware store. The caulk did great at sticking to the cast neoprene but I was not happy with the amount of detail I was able to get into the caulk, lets face it caulk is not meant as a sculpting medium but hey I wanted to try it out. The caulk is the darker areas on the lower half of the mask.  It has been covered in this picture with a layer of regular neoprene and tissue paper.  Now this worked very well, take a piece of tissue paper (cheep toilet paper with the edges torn off, works great) and paint a line of neoprene on the mask lay the edge of the tissue paper over it and carefully paint the neoprene over the paper. Use a cheep brush and take your time.  With practice you can get lots of nice wrinkles and groves.  This is a variation of  technique called corpusing used in the halloween haunt industry. I have found this technique to be very helpful ( I use it a lot) and their are lots of variations of it out on the internet check them out sometime.  Once I had the whole mask covered with tissue paper and neoprene I started painting a coat of black neoprene over everything. This does two things, one it is easy to see when everything has a coat of neoprene , and two it gives me a solid color base coat to paint on.  As a nice plus I find it easier to see a lot of the detail when it black.  This is not as easy to see in the pictures.  Here is a picture of the mask after I have finished coating it with the black neoprene.
The shine makes it hard to see the detail but once I have painted it white it will show up much better.  That is the next step, painting ( with my airbrush if I can find it) it mostly white.  I am hoping to do that latter this week


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