The next big challenge was going to be the head. For the furrier among you I was going to have to create, in essence, a partial fursuit from scratch in about a week and a half.
The clothes and cape weren't a terrible problem. Ash wears all white, so a pair of white painter's pants and a white long sleeve shirt took care of most of it. I wasn't able to find a white beach towel in my local stores in october so I ordered it through amazon.com. Since I'm terrible at sewing I also purchased my tail through an artist from canada (beetlecat).
After making a quick cut to my beach towel the cape was ready.
Which basically left the head. Now out of most of the fursuits that I see the heads are oversized and slightly cartoony, which wasn't the direction that I wanted to go. Since I wanted to create something fairly thin I didn't think that foam would hold up. So I went with a prosthetics rubber.
The first step was to create a lifecast of my face. I have previously done lifecasting with dental alginate, and while it works I would highly reccomend smooth-on's skin safe lifecasting rubber. After applying some of the included face release cream we got started.
An hour later and I had a fairly durable replica of my ugly mug. Unlike the dental alginate molds that I've created before, this rubber lifecast mold should last for several years.
Just a couple of hours later I had a base to sculpt on.
Unfortunately I didn't take all that many shots of the next phase of the process as at the time I still hadn't decided to restart this blog.
The rubber that I choose to work with (smooth-on's ecoflex 0030) was to soft to create the entire mask out of without having the muzzle droop down. So the first thing I did was to cast an upper and lower jaw out of a light weight plastic (smooth-on's featherlite).
Using smooth-on's (can you tell I'm a fan of their materials?) Rebound 25 mold making rubber I made molds of the upper and lower parts. Then a mold of the overall face shape into which I placed the plastic parts I had previously cast. I screwed up pretty good on the last step and forgot to spray down the final mold with a mold release. The ecoflex bonded to the mold and I had to cut the mold apart with an Exacto knife.
Finally though we got to putting fur onto the head. I got my fur from mendel's (mendel's online store) Unfortunately most things wont stick directly to the rubber so I used the glue for attaching the mask to my face to attach the fur (smooth-on skintite)
This turned out to work fairly great.
For the back of the head I created a simple mold out of masking tape and used some moldable wire mesh to create the ear shapes before using a liquid fabric glue to attach the fur to the masking tape cap.
Not to bad. I wore the costume for Halloween at the Texas Renaissance Festival . Where it was a hit with everyone. From the young ...
To the awesome...
To other fans of the film...
So get out there and build something.
Awesome
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