Latex Casting!

To start of this fourth week, I got the latex casting underway! Firstly I started with my plaster mould of my shoe, made in the previous week. Once cleaned up with a brush and lighter fluid, I examined the mould to see if any air bubbles were apparent, there were one or two, so, shown below, I filled in the air bubbles with a tiny bit of miliput.

                      
                     After this was completed, I did the same with my hand’s plaster moulds.

Then, using the materials seen above, I set out on creating the latex for my shoes.

To do this, I mixed brown latex pigment together with acrylic brown and black paints to achieve a colour a couple of shades lighter than I wanted.

This is done because latex dries a horrible light brown/beige colour when on it’s own, so when it’s mixed with the pigment, it dries much darker compared to when you first make it.

Once I had my lighter colour, I mixed in the latex. Trying to make sure that the pigment was only 5 percent of the mixture.

I then painted the latex into the mould, in layers, I would do one layer, then let it dry, then another, then another, until I had about 4-5 layers.
Next, I let it dry overnight.

TA DAH!  

They’re a bit dirty here, but here are the finished latex shoes!

 I cleaned them up and trimmed the excess around the edges.

Now on to the hands...

I set my desk out like so, with my plaster moulds, a bottle of latex, (disguised in a ice tea bottle), paint brushes, acrylic paints and the spray can I will be using on my character’s head.

Firstly, I sprayed a bit of my ‘Cappuccino’ coloured spray can onto a piece of paper to get the colour of my character’s skin visually, and then tried my best to match the colour in acrylic, mixing dark yellow, red, white and a beige colour together, once I got the exact match, I added a couple of drops of white, to compensate for the colour of the latex. I poured the latex into the acrylic mixture, painted it on the previously sprayed paper, and using a hairdryer, just dried it to see what if the colour matched. Once I was happy with it, I started painting it in to the moulds like the picture shows…

Above: The first coat of latex in my mould.

Once 5 layers were achieved in the mould, I painted hand my armature with a layer of latex as fits with very little space, and placed it in the mould.

The next stage wasn’t pictured as I had to be quick and couldn’t take a picture, But I basically filled in the fingers with latex, and as much as I could with the palms, painted latex all around the edges of the hand, stuck the two parts of the mould together and held them together with a clamp.

Above: The two parts of the mould held together with a clamp. This stayed like this for two days.

They came out like this... But these were not the final ones I used, I didn't like how they turned out, so I attempted them again in silicone. Pictures of the final hands will be up soon.