I’ve decided to stick with the title “Death Becomes Her” for this years costume. It’s the inspiration and as a title it’s accurate and poetic.
I’ve just completed a nice chunk of work and pulled my foam “shotgun” wounds. They look good, and I’m excited to start painting.

All right, this is my initial set-up at my workspace with my tools, water and clay. I’m using a piece of blue foam that is cut to the dimensions of the video monitors I’m using. I drew an “X” on the foam over the area that the screen is. It’s covered with plastic so the clay doesn’t actually touch it.

Here’s the back piece. This is the “entrance” wound, so it’s textured with a shotgun bullet spray.

This is the front wound, greased up and ready for plaster. It’s coated with Vaseline so the clay won’t stick to the plaster. The clay wall is there to stop the plaster from running off.

Here you have both pieces upside down after they have been cast in plaster. I was trying to get a level bottom on them so I could work with them more easily.

The mold after pulling out most of the clay. You can see those two narrow slots, that are the ribs. Those were difficult to clean out, as were many of the nooks and crannies

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This is what the cleaned out and prepared mold look like. These have been sealed and sprayed with a release agent. I used all of those tools to clean out the clay debris. Luckily I’m working in a ceramics studio so I had access to a great variety of tools. The dental tools worked really well and the stiff brush was necessary. I felt like a archaeologist cleaning out dinosaur fossils. One of those keyboard vacuums would have been really handy.

This is a plastic box I made to stand in for the monitors. I made it to the same dimensions out of this smooth plastic that resists the foam. I needed it to control where the foam expanded in the mold.

Here it is set into the curing liquid foam. For those who aren’t familiar; I use Smooth-On Flex Foam X.

My final pieces! They need some trimming and I will be setting some elastic in them but they worked really well. You can see some of the brownish tinge to the front piece left from the clay debris I didn’t remove.

This is a back view that shows how nicely the plastic box resisted the foam. It’s a perfect fit for the monitors.

Front View

Back view

nicole

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Costumes, Death Becomes Her Costume. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.