Playing with latex: Mask making

So maybe a whole Portal gun made in a tiny window of time with limited experience and materials was a wee bit ambitious?

Yeah, I figure it was.

But hey! New Year! New start, right? And you know where we're starting? We're starting small. I figure the best thing to do, rather than charge in glue-guns a'blazing and tackle a suit of N7 armour (oh God, I wish) I'd wind it all back for the start of 2013 and start extremely small and work my way up, making small things with small quantities of materials to learn some valuable lessons and maybe build my way up in scope, size and ambition as time goes on.

So anyways, masks, they're pretty small, right? At least those little domino masks you see on certain iconic heroes. On top of that, they're all pretty consistent in terms of design and effect, a flexible covering over the eye area (the flexibility probably comes more from an artistic requirement to display emotion and reaction through facial expressions, something hindered by solid masks, rather than any technical reason though). Keeping all this in mind, I settled on having a play with these masks to start the new year off in small scale.

Tools & Materials: Cheap paintbrushes
                                Generic Liquid latex
                                Black artist's acrylic paint
                                Polystyrene mannequin's head
                                Craft knife
                                Scissors
                                Generic white chalk

Time taken: One day (an evening's work, a night's worth of drying and a morning)

The process:

So to start with, I got everything ready, this is extremely simple, so there's relatively few materials involved, just the latex and paint for the mask and the head and brush as tools. The reason for the head mannequin is that latex, as it dries, takes on the form of whatever it's applied to (hence its widespread use as a material for making moulds in the casting process), because I wanted this to fit perfectly to a face, the only real option is a mannequin head.

Now, I've seen some people say you can use latex house paint to colour the liquid latex (which on its own is white and dries to a yellow / clear solid, you can buy it precoloured, or use paint pigments, but that limits customisation or is a load of effort) but I don't know why you would when artist's acryllic is cheaper, comes in a wider range of colours and is more maneagable due to squeezy bottles. In the above picture I added a tiny amount of black acrylic paint to the latex and mixed it in, although it's slightly grey in the picture, it actually dries truer to the paint's colour, so this is something to keep in mind.

From what I've seen, latex can be applied directly to the object that'll give it its shape with no releasing agent, so here I simply brushed it on to the head, I made sure to paint it on in a area larger than the final product to ensure plenty of material to work with. Above is the first coat. I left this to dry before proceeding with the rest.

And above, is the 9th. Because you're brushing it on, the layers are very, very thin. Meaning there's a requirement for multiple layers to actually make any sort of thickness. Of course, we all know that I'm infamously impatient, so I'm sure we can all guess what I did next.

That's right, I slathered liquid latex on like there was no tomorrow. Unfortunately, whilst this did help build up the mask in a much shorter amount of time, it also destroyed the mask's smoothness, creating a lump uneven surface. Despite the amount I'd applied at this point, we can still see that the mask is quite insubstantial in terms of thickness

A lot more latex later, we can finally see some serious thickness developing on the mask, of course, due to a constantly rushed and thick application, we can see some serious texture developing.

Interstingly though, those drips of latex that ran off due to excessive application, when dried, despite being only being a layer thick were easily peeled off without tearing and proved surprisingly strong. Although I wouldn't make a mask out of one thick layer, this seems to demonstrate the strength of liquid latex and suggests that I could actually make a mask much thinner (turning thickness into an aesthetic, rather than practical choice)

 

Here's the mask the morning after. I gave it an entire night to dry (in an uncharacteristic show of restraint) to ensure the cutting process didn't get sticky.

I marked out the area of those mask that I wanted to cut using chalk to draw guide lines and a craft knife to score the initial cuts whilst the mask was still on the mannequin.

Now, I've heard complex methods for peeling masks of their forms, involving talcum power, makeup brushes etc, but I was able to peel this mask off without any aids. I'm presuming that this is due to the mask's thickness, but it may be something to do with the brand of latex used.

The next stage was taking a pair of scissors to the latex, it was surprisingly thick (at least 3-4mm) and this gave it a real rigidity, maintaining its form exceptionally well when away from the mold. The eye holes were a real pain to cut due to their internal curve, the knife wasn't able to pierce the latex, so I had to use scissors to cut, resulting in a mucb clumsier finish.

A bit more cutting later and this is what we've finished up with, there's not a lot to say, it's just a latex mask, but above the mask is just resting on two pins in the mannequin's brow as it kept sliding off due to its weight. Aside from those pins it's not fixed down anywhere, so the closeness to form we see is entirely maintained by the mask itself.

SO, what have we learned?

1: Latex; surprisingly strong. Although I like the effect of the mask standing out distinctly from the forms face, the run off drips have demonstrated the surprising strength of a tiny amount of latex. Also, despite it only being a few millimetres thick, it was surprisingly hard to cut.
2: Acrylic paint is a wonderful colouring agent for liquid latex, you only need a tiny bit to achieve the desired colour and the dried result presents a much bolder colour then the liquid mix
3: I'm impatient, who knew?
4: Something I've found out whilst looking at how to make a smooth mask (apparently there are a lot of other impatient sorts out there) is that latex applied in extremely thin layers via a sponge is the best method to use. I was worried that I'd get through the world of sponges doing this, as latex dries quite quickly in a thin layer, thus making the sponge unusable after one layer, but apparently if you keep the spone in the latex mix, neither it nor the latex will dry out. Something to keep in mind for next time.

Speaking of next time, with a better understanding of how latex works, dries and the application process, I'm hoping to create a smoother version of the above mask.

Until then!

Please, ma'am; the dog ate my Arpeture Science Handheld Portal Device!

Alright, not ate more smashed up.

Unfortunately, due to both unfortunate dog impacts and the huge rush I engaged in towards the end of the project I'm lacking photos of the finished project. I can still walk you through the main processes involved.

So above we have the expanding foam once it's expanded and set. It's really surprising how much mass you get at the end of it as the large shell's gone from being a bit larger than the cardboard base to two thirds the width of the table. Adding the fins on to the base really helped the foam stay in place and you can even see where those fins are in the foam's ridges. It also seems like moistening the cardboard a bit helped the foam stick and not applying it too thickly has had it dry nice and solidly.

The foam's surprisingly solid once it's set properly. I had to resort to using ridged knives to carve the foam rather than cut it with a stanley knife as I'd originally intended to. I started the cutting process by cutting along the edges of the bases.

Once I'd got the basic shape of the shells sorted out it was just a case of cutting the foam down until it was the right thickness and more curved than lots of flat edges.

Once I'd gotten the shells to the right size it was then a case of adding extra details on such as the ridges at the end of the barrel. Not pirctured below is the handle.

With the shells cut I used filler to fill in any overly large abcesses.

Now, in a perfect world I wound have had time to sand these too a smooth finish, apply a thin layer of paperclay and then sand that smooth. Unfortunately I was really short on time, so the quick and easy method to create a smooth and slightly solid surface was good old fasioned paper maché. One thing I learned about paper maché is that it should never be spray painted. Due to it sticking closely to whatever surface it's applied to, any sort of gloss finish really highlights an uneven surface. Whilst a matte finish with poster paint may have sort of hidden the faults a glossy finish really highlighted the flaws, as seen below.

 

Ugh.

Past this point, there wasn't a lot left to do, I sprayed the main body of the gun with black spray paint which gave it a surprisingly good colour despite the body not being coated with plastidip. The gun's 'arms' were simply made of cardboard strips with foam wrapped around them also sprayed back and attached to the front shell and midway down the barrel.

So, what did we learn?

1. Dooooooooooooooooogs!
2. Estimate the time required for a project if you're doing it to a deadline. Double it, then double it again. 

All in all, the most important thing I've learned in this project is that I should focus on the core aspects of an item and then work outwards into exterior details once I've got the solid foundations made, otherwise you wind up with the shell situation from earlier and not enough time to finish things up well.

Also, the expanding foam seems like a material that could be used in a lot of other projects.

Also, dogs. 

Unfinished prop: Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device

Oh hey, so remember that nice smooth, really cool looking shell I put loads of effort in to making?

Yeah, well you can forget it.

Turns out that as it dried, because I hadn't properly kept the two sides apart, the whole thing had curled in on itself, making it much narrower than the foam base and way too small for the barrel of the gun to fit through (which I was beginning to suspect it would have been anyway, so there's a lesson learned right there, don't spend loads of time and effort making something amazing without first checking it will fit on the most fundamental part of the prop at the end. Hurr).

So! A lot of weeks working, restarting my education and moving in to a new flat later, I'm now going to present a whistle stop tour of how to make a portal gun relatively quickly and as cheaply as possible!

Materials: LD45 Foam
                 Hotglue
                 Cardboard (Oh yes)
                 Plastic drinks bottles
                 Expanding insulation foam

There's a few steps that aren't photographed, so bear with a quick text explanation.

After learning that the gun's barrel is one of the most fundamental parts of it, especially in the creation of a fake gun, I decided to start there in order to not repeat my previous mistake. to make the barrel I simply cut the tops and bottoms off three two litre bottles of cola ( which makes a wicked drain cleaner, just so you know ) and slid the three together to form a strong cylinder. I then wrapped a sheet of LD45 foam around it making sure the seam was at the bottom to be as out of the way as possible and attached it with hot glue.

The next stage involved measureing everything up and working out where it would fit along the barrel. Some reference pictures later and I'd measured out where everything ought to sit.

 

What you see above is, from left to right, the enlarged section of the barrel that sits before the front shell and underneath where the main chamber is visible. I'd already cut this out and covered it with foam by the time I'd taken the picture. Those two flat sections serve as the front and back of the larger section which has the gun's handle on the rear and has the larger shell sitting on top. I basically cut these pieces out of cardboard and attached foam to their exterior.

Just a sheet of cardboard cut to fit and glued to the edges of those two panels.

And then a nice foam wrap, with the seam on the bottom (although in retrospect,I should have put it on the top as that's where the shell sits. As you can see, I used a craft-knife to cut away a portion of the foam to expose the clear plastic to act as the visible portion of the chamber. The only issue here is that if you look inside you can see the dried hotglue used to attach the foam through the plastic. I'm going to have to mask the clear portion, then spray the inside of the barrel for a better finish.

Once I had the sizes of everything the shells would need to fit around, I started with simple ' U ' shaped lengths of cardboard that I then drew the basic shape of the shells on and then cut out. In order to make the shells 3D I cut cross sections of how the shell should be and stuck them on at intervals, the plan is to fill them in with expanding foam which I can later cut away, carve and fill. Above is the front most shell.

Pictured is the completed base for foam for the front and rear shells.

And there we have the two covered in expanding foam. Hopefully, once it's fully dried and set I can just carve it into the basic shape, sand it down (using my recently found skills in that particular area) and then fill it in before painting.

I'd actually tried the expanding foam thing before, but that went horribly wrong. I didn't include the 'fins' to give myself basic guidelines (and more importantly: keep the foam attached to the cardboard) and the foam wound up falling away from the base inside itself and having a hard, exterior layer of foam coupled with a gooey interior mess that was no good to anyone. This time I moistened the cardboard a little to help the foam stick and didn't use too much.

I've also managed to get it on my jeans both times and this stuff just does not come out, so I'm looking forward to soaking two pairs of jeans in acetone to try and shift it.

So, what did we learn?

1. Jesus Christ, John, for once in your life would you just stop and actually think about what you're doing before you go and spend weeks on single piece that can't be used, CHRIST.
2. Expanding foam is a cruel mistress, make sure it'll adhere to the surface, don't use too much, don't use too little, make sure there're no oversized pockets of air in which things could go terribly wrong... And that's just the application.
3. Whenever you're doing something that's basically a lot of shapes, start with the most basic one and work your way outwards.

This post was brought to you after a solid 10 hour stint on this and an Emil costume (which you'll get to see later) so apologies if I sound like a bit of a psycho.

Of course, if the foam stuff doesn't work, I *will* go psycho, so look forward to that.

Unfinished prop: Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device

Not a big post, this one, but after three days of on and off work I felt like just posting something. So here it is!

Ta-da!

It doesn't look like a massive leap, but the amount of work that's gone into this shell at this point has been pretty intense. Once the shell had totally dried I gave the exterior a coating of joint compound (polyfiller)  to fill in all the deep recesses and started sanding. Once I'd sanded it, I filled in all the extra areas with more filler and I've essentially had to repeat this process about 10 times in order to get what you see before you. The exterior edges are still a big rough as they were extremely inconsistent so I've had to add a lot of filler to even them out. For the sanding I've been starting off with 50 grit sandpaper, sanding down all the really obvious lumps and bumps, moving to 80 to do finer work and then finishing it up with 120 grit. In places it's perfectly smooth, but due to my erratic texture that I left when I coated the shell with clay intially, it's rather lumpy in places.

Still, this gun was never going to be amazing, so I'll let myself off (although it's something to keep in mind). You can also still see that the inside looks like the bottom of f batcave, but I'm not sure I'll have the time to sand the whole thing smooth so there's some planning ahead to do on how to fudge that. I'm hoping I can cover up the majority of the inside of the shell with the gun barrel. I'm also thinking that; considering how well the exterior layer alone held the shape, I may only do an exterior layer on the rear shell in order to cut down on the workload as it'll be supported by the gun barrel and handle anyway.

So! What have we learned?

1. Sanding's hard and although the name of the activity suggests otherwise, it's not all about the sanding. I was surprised to discover that it's as much filling in gaps and building edges up with extra material as it is about wearing material away. If you were to just sand you'd never get anything smooth.
2. Not to coat the inside of the next shell with clay. Also, to try to finish the initial layer of paperclay on the outside so that it's much smoother than this one was. To save on both sanding and the amount of filler used.

Unfinished prop: Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device

Materials: LD45 Foam
                 Homemade Paperclay
                 Hot Glue
                 Polyfiller ( Joint Compoud )

Time taken: Two days ( so far )

Safe to say, that this is going to be the most ambitious project of mine yet. The complicated nature of the gun itself, coupled with the mixed material approach I'm using are doubtlessly going to result in hilarity ( read: my tears of frustration ) at some stage as I'm yet to really combine any radically different materials. I'm actually making this gun for a friend of mine with a deadline of the 28th October, so the pressure's really on.

The first part of this I've decided to work on is the front most 'shell' of the gun, where the user's hand rests underneath the end of the barrel. The gun's shells are where I forsee all the major complications for this project arising as they're quite complicated 3D curves and are going to need to be 'solid' to match the in game gun's metal / fibreglass effect.

So, to work! In the interests of saving time and money I've forgone the whole sculpt, vacuform, cut method ( Which, personally, I would love to be doing, in a perfect world ) and instead I'm going to mash up some pepakura with some paperclay. The first step was to get ahold of a .pdo file of the portal gun which was kindly supplied by a user over at the Replica Prop Forum.

 

For those not in the know, Pepakura is a piece of software that takes 3D models and 'unfolds' them into parts that can be printed off, cut out and reassembled. It's the software of choice for most people into their papercraft and the concept can be conviniently be transferred over to prop making by cutting the pieces out in foam rather than paper. Due to the ( relatively ) simple nature of the gun's barrel, I've opted to just use Pepakura for the shells.

 So after printing off the pieces, I cut them out, ignoring the fastening triangles as they're not necessary when working with foam.

Once that was done, I lay the pieces down on foam that I'd already covered with PVA glue, I then covered the top with PVA in order to ensure that it was stuck fast. I repeated this process for the other half of the shell and left the whole thing in an airing cupboard to dry.

Once dried it was simple enough to cut the foam out to match the paper laid on top of it. When it was cut to match I could easily peel the paper off. Once the whole thing was cut out I hot-glued the whole thing together. Unfortunately I'm missing a picture of how the shell looks at this stage, but I'm sure you can imagine.

Since the shells are rigid, the next part of the process involved the use of paperclay. Although choices for this like fibreglass or Jesmonite ( A UK produced, non toxic alternative) exist, I went with paper clay. A relatively lightweight and surprisingly sturdy alternative for making solid props. The upside is that paper clay can be made at home with relatively inexpensive ingredients. (As seen here) Having made a batch, I coated the exterior of the shell with it, using a two liter bottle to help keep the shell's form and left it to set for 24 hours in an airing cupboard.

Once paper clay dries out it goes almost rock solid and the shape is set, as seen below.

With the exterior done, I also coated the shell's interior, leaving that to set for a further 12 hours.

Once the whole thing had dried out, I coated the exterior with a layer of polyfiller in order to fill in all the small dips and cracks to make sanding the whole thing down a simpler process, I then left the shell to dry again.

SO, what did we learn?

1. Follow the recipe. What you're seeing above is the succesful batch of paperclay. I actually repeated this whole process for the larger rear shell, but where the recipe for paperclay is proportional ( being a UK resident the term 'cup' for me actually resulted in my use of a cup to measure quantities) I figured I could just double all the quantities, so where I'd used one roll of toilet paper before, I then used two. Turns out not all toilet rolls were made equal and that the two I used the second time around yielded a lot more paper than the first I had used, resulting in a soft, extremely mallable when dry, high paper content clay that I could simply peel off the shell whereas the first batch stuck tight to the foam immediately.
2. Remain consistent with ingredients. Toilet roll is the obvious one, but in the second batch I also used standard polyfiller as apposed to the fine cracks variety that I'd used previously. Despite using four times what I had the first time around to try to offset the paper, standard polyfiller doesn't adhere as wel, nor set as rigid as the fineline crack variety.

The next stage is going to be a hopefully more succesful attempt to coat the rear shell in a better batch of paperclay. Whilst that's drying I'll also take a stab at sanding the first shell to a smooth finish. Although I could start constructing the barrel now, I'd rather wait until both shells are done as they're the most distinctive part of the gun and the other components revolve around them.

Finished prop: Zaku Heat Hawk on the cheap

Materials: Cardboard
                 Cardboard inner tubes
                 Masking tape
                 PVA glue
                 Hot glue
                 Plastidip Aerosol Spray

                 Green & Silver Spray paint
                 Permanent Marker

Time taken: One Week

So due to a chronically unreliable printer, the beam spray gun project was canned as I couldn't print off the E-cap (although I did have a brief foray into Blender to make the part, which may come in useful in future). Because of this, I was left a bit high and dry for things to do. Thankfully, some cardboard inner tubes were left hanging around and I figured since I'd scrapped one Gundam project I may as well move on to another. Since I'd been using up a lot of foam in the past two efforts I wanted to have a shot at doing something on the cheap, this Heat Hawk is the result.

The process: 

So, first up I took the cardboard tubes and cut them up, to create the angled part in the axe I cut the connecting section at a 45 degree angle. It was a surprisingly weird line to draw, so I had to first roll a tube out of paper and cut it to the right shape, then lay it over the tube and cut it to match.

The next stage was pretty simple, just glue the whole thing together, making sure the parts all lined up.

Throughout this process I was measuring everything to make sure every part was in proportion to some concept art I'd found online. After sticking the tubing together I drew the main blade of the axe out on some cardboard. and then cut it out and used it as a template to cut out another blade.

Once I'd cut out the blades, I stuck them together, then using PVA I pinched the edges together in order to create and actual 'blade'.

In order to cover up the corrogated edges of the cardboard, as well as the rough edges of the 'blade'. I'd seen this technique used in a tutorial on cardboard weapons and the writer swore by it. However I found that masking tape tends to peel away extremely easily ( which, when you think about it, is a good property for masking tape ). I used the tutorial writer's technique of sticking it down with PVA, but the glue didn't penatrate the tape well at all (again, a good property for masking tape). After a lot of PVA the tape did stick, but it took an awful lot.

Next up, I cut these two pieces of cardboard and stuck them to the top of the handle. These pieces would hold the blade away from the main tube.

Added a bit of hot glue and let it set.

After that, I cut out two more pieces of cardboard to fit along the tube and around the rear edges of the blades in order to cover up the empty space.

After sticking masking tape along the joined edges I used a little bit of left over foam ( I know, I didn't list it. It could have just have easily been cardboard, but for the sake of comfort I went for foam).

Next up, is the piping, it starts off with a hexagonal part at the top of the main tube, simple enough.

To make the tubing I cut a question mark shape out of a flat piece of cardboard and then wrapped lengths of cardboard into circles around it, spacing them relatively equally. They were stuck in place with got glue with masking tape along the seams.

Using thinner card (think cereal box thickness) I cut out circles with a slit missing to act as the tops and bottoms for the cylinders along the rear piping. All the seams were covered up with masking tape. I attached this to a piece of cardboard that was simply glued to the top of the main handle. I made the spike at the bottom of the handle with a tube of cardboard and a cone made from thin card.

I proceeded to cover the whole thing with plastidip to seal it against moisture. Annoyingly, somewhere along the way the top part of the axe became too heavy for the joint and the top came away from the bottom. The white you can see in this picture is from some hasty hotglueing.

To get around this, I made this support brace to hold everything together. I hotglued it to the main tubing and covered it with more plastidip.

Here's the whole thing at this point. As you can see, this axe is huge, so whilst it was entirely in proportion with itself, it's much larger in relation to me than a heat hawk should be to a Zaku II.

The final step was painting the whole thing green. I followed the green paint up by masking off an area with masking tape and painting it grey. Once both sides had been done, I added detail on with permanent marker. This also served to cover up the misty transition between the grey and green.

So there we have it! The finish wasn't so great, but to the undiscerning eye, this thing actually looks halfway alright.

SO, what did we learn?

1. Masking tape isn't great for covering edges. As I've pointed out, it peels away very easily and is very, very good at letting moisture through, all the properties you'd want ffrom it. Of course, this makes it terrible for the purpose I put it to in this project. Maybe the tutorial writer used sub par tape? We'll never know.
2. I should have used foam for the tubes on the piping, corrugated cardboard doesn't roll into a perfect curve edged.
3. The spray paint I use has a very glossy finish, which doesn't lend to the dull metallic kind of finish the axe is supposed to have. As you can see from the pictures, it's very reflective. I'm considering a clear matte finish spray, but the tins that it comes in are quite small, so it'd be pretty costly.
4. If I'm making a prop, make sure it's in proportion to me as well as itself. I did this with the beam gun, so perhaps next time drawing the whole thing up ahead of time.

So I'm pretty happy with it, it's surprisingly solid, the bladed edge is pretty painful if someone whacks you with it and it makes a very smooth swoosh when you swing it around. Considering this whole thing cost me nothing at all as I already had everything, I can't complain.