Green Man Mask

Instead of doing stuff I had originally planned to do this past weekend, I took a vacation from my ever-consuming film projects and made something completely different. I like the image of the Celtic Green Man or Jack-In-the-Green; The human face with leaves for hair and beard. It's a powerful but cheerful symbolic image of the symbiosis between nature and man, or at least it's a reminder that we should be connected to nature.

I thought a Green Man mask would look just right on the staircase wall in my house, so I sculpted one in Chavant clay on top of a plaster cast of a friend's face.

When the sculpture was good enough for me I built a clay wall around it and poured in DragonSkin Q silicone. The silicone was slushed around over the sculpture until it set (in about seven minutes)

I applied some more silicone, with added thickener, to cover all areas properly. I tinted the new layer green so I'd see exactly where I'd put it.

I put a reinforcing plaster shell over the silicone. This shell created a "cradle" to put the silicone mold into, making sure it maintains its shape while the casting process is going on.

Here's the first-ever casting of my Green Man mask in SmoothCast 325 plastic.

And after some clean-up and acrylic airbrush painting it looks like this. Those are my eyes peering through the mask. It was a quick, fun thing to do, although I really should've spent this weekend doing some puppet work instead.

Concerning Brown Jenkin

Just a short post about the film featuring the Brown Jenkin puppet -for those of you wondering what it might look like moving about.

Brown Jenkin Comes Alive

Last fall I got in touch with Jennifer, who has the YouTube channel RavenOfPoe. She creates little videos with philosophical musings, poetry readings and quotes. She did a terrific reading of a part of H P Lovecraft's short story "The Dreams in the Witch House". The part in question describes "Brown Jenkin"; a rat with a human head and a witches familliar. I thought her reading was so good I asked if I could use it for a short-short video project on the subject. She gladly agreed and I went off to my workshop to produce the Jenkin puppet. A couple of months ago I shot scenes with a friend of mine acting out the angst of Walter Gilman, the unlycky hero of the story. Last weekend I shot the last live-action scenes with a witch puppet and some background footage, so it's time to put this one together.

Which means I have no moving images to show yet, but I do have a pretty thorough documentation of the making of the Brown Jenkin puppet. As always I started off with a sculpture of the head. If you get the head right, the rest follows quite easily.

First I cast a stiff latex head skin and attached it to the aluminum wire/friendly plastic armature. My intention at the beginning was to not show very much of Jenkin apart from something quick-moving. But of course while working with the character I fell in love with him and wanted a better-looking head.

This meant I would finally cast my luck into the silicone pond. A make-up artist friend of mine recommended PlatSil Gel 10 to me and I bought a set from Mapont in Sweden. This silicone can probably be found from a number of retailers in the US, the UK and other countries. One place I know of and can recommend is Bity Mold Supply. Mitch, who runs the store, also has a very cool YouTube channel, where he shows how to use many of his products. As you can see, the finished silicone skin is very flexible. I added some Silc Pig red and flesh tint from SmoothOn.com while mixing the two-part silicone. Ideally, I would've added some red flocking but that wasn't available when I bought the silicone.

The head armature for this puppet turned out very simple in the end. I chose to add just two moving sections; an aluminum wire to animate the nose/upper lip and a jointed jaw.

The silicone face was attached to the head armature using Sil-Poxy silicone glue. This stuff also comes from SmoothOn and will stick silicone to absolutely everything.

Sil-Poxy takes about 10 minutes or so to do its work properly. The question was how to keep the silicone face pressed against the armature without having to sit and press on it with my fingers. The simple solution was to hold the face in place with some bits of thick aluminum wire.

Here's the face attached to the armature. As you can see I've also started to add some pieces of upholstery foam to the body.

There was no need for any accurate reconstruction of muscle patterns. Just some basic stuff, so I would know that I was on the right track shaping the body while adding the fur later. The tail and the feet were simply wrapped with thin string and dipped in flesh-tinted latex.

Claws are sometimes a bit of a bother since it's hard to get them to stick properly to the fingers. The best solution seems to be to make them out of the same material as the fingers, in this case latex. I cut out claw shapes in thin cardboard and dipped them in latex tinted black.

The latex-covered paper claws are then simply attached to the fingers with some un-tinted latex. They are quite flexible and very durable, and always maintain their original shape.

I've started adding the fur. So far it's just about gluing down pieces of fake fur. But for the legs and the face I had to add small clups of hair, glued down with latex or silicone glue.

Here's the Sil-Poxy again. When using this to add hair to the silicone face I scraped up a tiny amount of glue on a dental tool.

A small clump of fur was cut off the fake fur fabric.

The Sil-Poxy was smeared onto the face.

The clump of fur was pressed down onto the face and a tiny amount of Sil-Poxy was added on top of the hair ends.

Here's the finished result. Since Sil-Poxy is transparent it won't really show up that much despite being a bit shiny. If you add it thinly it's even less obvious and you don't have to add that much, since its bond is super strong.

Time to paint the little bugger. Which means it's time for some more SmoothOn product placement. Their Psycho Paint is designed to be used on any platinum silicone, which means that it will stick to PlatSil Gel 10 as well. You mix the two Psycho Paint components with whatever tinting you find workable. I used SmoothOn's Silc Pic pigments.

When thinned with Toulene you can put the Psycho Paint mix through your airbrush, though I didn't have the guts to try that out this time. It wasn't necessary either, since the puppet's face only needed some minor touch-ups.

And here's the finished paint job.

The fur on the legs was stuck on with latex. The process is very simple, with overlapping layers. You just have to remember which end is the right one to start at.

The finished fur covering on a leg. The latex bond is very strong and should a shiny surface appear from it, just dab it with some baby powder or transparent make-up powder.

The finished Mr Jenkin. Hopefully, you'll se him wriggling about on a YouTube screen near you quite soon. Lastly; a quick description of the creature by Lovecraft himself:
"Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch's blood, which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages."

Some More YouTube Stuff.

Those of you who have looked through my blog will already have seen posts on this stuff, but I decided to make a couple of image streams for YouTube on the subjects. They might be of interest, as they include video footage of the finished puppets and props at work. So, enjoy!

Goblin Wood Behind the Scenes (of a sort).

Some more YouTube stuff. These two little documentaries were made for the DVD, so Angelica could show them to her class. They are made to be watched by a 10 year old audience and therefore very simple. But I hope you'll find something in them to enjoy anyway.

Goblin Wood Film Up!

After finishing the DVDs for the folks involved in the film I posted it on YouTube (HERE). Still NOT happy with how YouTube compresses videos. The image quality when using HQ is fine, but the flow of the video appears disrupted and choppy. I can't have both good image and movement, apparently, though some YouTubers appear to have solved that problem. However, using their exact settings for compression doesn't solve mine. The web is weird.

Bilbo Baggins Figurine

I love sculpting characters using my favorite clay in the Universe; Chavant. Mostly, my sculptures end up as puppets or masks, but I have also done sculptures that are cast as plastic figurines. For the past three months I've been really busy finishing films for both myself and others, plus I've been doing some art for books. But I decided to spend ten minutes every morning right before I go to work on creating a sculpture, made for no other redeeming reason except that it's fun to just do it. I decided to try my hand at one of my favorite characters ever; Mr Bilbo Baggins, hero of J R R Tolkien's "The Hobbit". I think the moment that best sums up Hobbit life is when Bilbo steps out to smoke his enormous pipe right in the beginning of chapter one ("early one morning in the quiet of the world"). He hears someone (Gandalf) coming up the path beside his Hobbit hole and starts to turn his head.

This sculpture was going to be quite small, but still needed some support. I made this very simple frame using tin wire and a plastic bottle cap.

The humble beginnings of Mr Baggins. I soften the Chavant with a heat gun and just slap it on to form a basic shape.

I was pretty sure I had taken a couple of photos of the sculpture in the middle stages of its creation. Obviously it wasn't so, so we'll skip right to the finished version. I added a clay pipe just for fun. It wasn't a part of the finished casting.

Here's a bunch of photos showing how the silicone mold was cast. I used DragonSkin Q from SmoothOn Inc. First I sponged on a very thin layer, just to get rid of air bubbles. I then built up a Chavant clay wall around the base, then pouring in silicone and letting it seek its level. Then the clay wall went up a little futher with more silicone, and on and on until the sculpture was covered. This way I was able to make a very sturdy, yet not overly thick, silicone mold. In the last two images you can see the clay wall removed and then the sculpture dismantled and taken out. I had to cut the mold in the back a bit using a hobby knife. I also cut the space between Bilbo's legs inside the mold in order to get the support frame out.

SmoothCast 325 (also from SmoothOn) was poured into the mold. To the right; the casting just after it came out of the mold.

The finished Bilbo figurine. The pipe was made by softening Friendly Plastic and rolling it into a long tube, then shaping it. The head of the pipe was made out of Apoxie sculpt. But if I start making any copies I'll make a pipe head that can be cast instead. The figurine was painted with acrylic airbrush colors. In some areas I painted on the color with a brush.
I think this turned out quite well. Bilbo is 13 cm tall. You see, the plan is now to go on doing some other characters from the book; Gandalf, Thorin, Gollum, the Great Goblin and so on. Making Bilbo this size will allow me to make many of the other characters in scale, ending with Beorn. The Trolls and Smaug, if I ever make them, will have to be in a scale of their own.
It seems my mornings will be booked for a while ahead. Roll on Gandalf..