Biddley biddley bong!

Well, it's been a long time since I last posted. Partly this is due to some demoralisation on my part because the final Hitchcock sculpture/puppet turned out shite, a massive disappointment.

To cheer myself up, I dressed up Nick Griffin:

Alfred Hitchcock: Part 4

Little progress - I've been incredibly busy at work recently, which has taken it out of me - so I've just been tweaking and improving it, and this, I think, is pretty much the final result:


This weekend I'll make the mould...

Alfred Hitchcock: Part 3

Good news - the McGuffins are happy with the sculpt! I plan to build a full body to go with the head, and exhibit it at a McGuffin's event in September, so watch this space...

On the other hand, this Hitchcock sculpt is proving harder than I'd originally thought. You would think, "Alfred Hitchcock - piece of piss." But no - it's very easy to end up with a sort of Generic Fat Bloke, which is what I felt I had in my previous post. So, a few days of faffing about, and this is where I am - I feel it now really captures the essence of Hitchcock, as it were...




Tomorrow I shall refine it, add some minor, but important, detailing, and get on with mouldmaking. Later, I'll show what those holes in the eyeball blanks are for.

Alfred Hitchcock: Part 2

Slightly behind schedule, I had hoped to have completed it by today in time for the McGuffin's quiz, but I've only (almost) completed the sculpting of the master, so here it is:






Just need to add some fine details, such as brow furrows and eyebrows and tomorrow I can get on with making the mould (which I shan't cover in detail as it will be almost exactly the same process as for the Nick Griffin puppet, with one exception which I will cover in due course).

Alfred Hitchcock: Part 1

My new project is Alfred Hitchcock, which I hope can be used by a local (Waltham Forest based) compaign group the McGuffins, who are campaigning to get the derelict local EMD Cinema, bought several years ago by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), restored as a cinema for the community. The McGuffins are called thus because 'McGuffin' was Alfred Hitchcock's term for the desired object around which any plot revolves, motivating the characters into action, and Alfred Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone in... Waltham Forest! Waltham Forest is, ironically given the connection to one of British cinema's greatest directors, one of the two London boroughs not to have a cinema, hence the interest in rejuvenating the EMD, for both practical and heritage reasons.

The puppet will be made in much the same way as Nick Griffin was, so I shan't cover it in the same depth, but as a departure I have first made a smaller scale maquette (from Super Sculpey) which has helped enormously to get an idea of the basic shapes and proportions. I will scale this up around 50% or so to sculpt the fullsize version from plasticine.

Here's the maquette:

Nasty Nick Part 6: Coloured

Ooh, he wouldn't like that, our Nick, being described as 'coloured' but, if you're reading this, fear not my bargain-bin would-be Aryan, I refer merely to your puppet avatar being painted!

There are new, more convincingly-proportioned irises in the eyes, courtesy of my old mucker Al. The jawline, upper lips and jowls were painted with more artists' acrylics, the skin tone I used earlier was mixed with a little extra brown to darken it a tad and some blue to give it a grey cast, suggestive of a mild five-o-clock shadow. The cheeks and nose were lightly dusted with modelmakers' acrylics to give a rosy cast; this both breaks up the facial colours, and helps bring out the nose especially, which was prone before to disappearing against the the background of the rest of the face. You can see the importance of these steps if you scroll right to the bottom of this page, in a photo showing the cast head with it's base tinted skin juxtaposed with the final item.

This is not a realistic way of painting a face - anyone looking for hints and tips on painting realistically (for, say, prosthetic appliances) will be making a big mistake reading this blog! But, having studied the superlative Spitting Image, I realised that for these types of figures, a stylised look is what is needed. It's all about creating an effect rather than realism.

And so, for example, the insides of the nostrils and mouth were painted near-black, to accentuate their shadowed nature, a completely unrealistic technique, but one that's vital to help bring the figure to some kind of life. Finally, the eyebrows were dabbed on with sponge.

Indeed, lacking as I do an airbrush, all colours were applied with bits of sponge cut up and shaped for whatever type of painting I was doing at the time.

You can click on all pictures for biggitude...

Nasty Nick Part 5: Casting

Somewhat ineptly, I completely failed to take any photos of the casting process. Nevertheless, I'll try to describe it, though as mentioned in an earlier post, when it came to applying the latex I followed Lars Carlsson's superbly informative video pretty much slavishly.

First, make the skin, for which you will need liquid latex. To make painting the head easier later on, it's best to tint the latex first to provide a base colour. For this, use special latex colourants (I get mine from another London store, 4D Modelshop - £2.20 for 150g). White, a smidge of brown, a hint of red, and a dab of yellow, together with a tincture of blue, muck around until you find a colour you like. I haven't yet tried their recipes, but this is an excellent looking guide to how to achieve various flesh tones, from pale & interesting (okay, pasty) to dark as dark. When you're happy with the colour, add a little to the latex - the latex should be very pale, it darkens as it dries. Experiment first.

I made the actual skin by pouring a little of the tinted latex into one half of the mould and dabbing it around with some sponge. Build up a few layers, adding each as the preceding one dries. Strengthen the mouth area with pieces of bandage soaked into the latex. Also, it would probably be useful to add a smallish 'plate' made from a semi-flexible material (perhaps thin styrene sheet) to the lower inside of the mouth because that is where only a thumb acts upon the mouth, and the small surface area of the thumb will push through the flexible foam and rubber. The upper part of the mouth doesn't need it as the other four fingers will manipulate it.

You want both halves of the mould to have a few layex layers built up so that the colouring is fairly opaque. To create cavities for the eyes, I used the same hemispherical shapes that the final eyes will be made from and actually glued them to the inside of the latex skin exactly where the final eyeballs will need to go. Then clamp both halves of the mould together with the bungee ropes, seal around the edges outside with platicine, and pour some more latex inside and tilt the mould around to get the latex to fill the seam between the two halves. When you're satisfied with this, leave for a few hours to dry.

What I'm trying to get is a flexible foam puppet head with a cavity for my hand to go up it to manipulate the mouth. Ideally, I should have made a special core for the mould, but I couldn't be arsed. Instead, when the mould was ready with the dry latex skin coating the inside, I propped up the mould topsy turvey so the opening was at the top. I then put on a marigold washing-up glove and stuck my hand inside the mould, holding the inside of what would become the open mouth. Then I poured in the urethane flexible foam mix.

This stuff is magic! For this head I used Tiranti's Self Skinning Flexible Polyurethane Foam. Although self-skinning, the process to get it to skin is slightly more complex and is something I shall experiment with later. Suffice to say that for this puppet, I needed the latex skin.

So anyway, I poured it in around my marigold-glove-clad arm and held that arm dead still for fifteen minutes or so as the foam rose and set. It gets quite warm, but not dangerously so (though it may be hazardous without the protection of the rubber glove). When set, the glove is firmly embedded (it's the yellow thing poking out from underneath the neck) and you can slip your hand in and out. The fit was very tight, caused by the foam compressing the flesh of my hand and forearm as it expanded and cured. If using this technique again, I would wear a glove over that hand and then the rubber marigold glove on top of that, to form a slightly larger cavity. Once the foam was fully cured, which you can tell as the surface ceases to be tacky, I then removed the casting from the mould.

Then clean up the copious flashing on the seams, cut the eyelids open with a scalpel and remove the plastic hemispheres, and get painting the hair...

I used standard Liquitex Artists' Acrylics for the hair - it's surprisingly flexible and sticks well. Later, I will subtly colour the skin using similar paints in much the same way I coloured the static Stephen Fry sculpture. The eyes were made using the same technique as for the Patrick Moore eyes.

So, it's not yet finished, but here are some photos of it thus far:


Most of the skin colour is the base tinted latex, but some areas have already had some painting - the rubber of the neck was very thin causing the white foam to show through, so I painted that; I had painted eyebrows on but they were rubbish, so I've painted over them, and some other areas where the skin was too thin and the foam was showing had a similar treatment to the neck.

Also, the ear on the right was completely deformed due to some balls-up with the mould (I suspect that a pry-hole was too close to the ear so that when I shoved a screwdriver in to help prise the mould apart, the pressure of the screwdriver distorted the plaster). So I ended up sculpting a new ear, making a small plaster mould and casting a tinted latex skin. I then stripped part of the skin from the bust's distorted ear and glued the new skin on, a disturbingly quasi-surgical procedure... If you look carefully at the ear on the right (above), you can see where the new skin doesn't line up with the old; it will be patched up with latex at some point.


I'll be replacing the irises of the eyes with larger ones later, when I can get a friend to print out a sheet. I'll probably add veins to the eye on the left to give it a slightly bloodshot look (the eye on the right is, on Nick Griffin, in real life a false eye).