CLARE HEDGES
RUNNING PIECES
FACE PIECE
The first time I ran my face piece, I used 5 x 100ml syringes - this was only partially sucessful. The cheeks appeared to fill with silicone but then leaked out again.
I wondered whether this was due to air pockets and put a bleeder hole in each of the cheeks.
I then wondered whether air had gotten into the mould while I was changing the syringes and decided that the next time I injected it, I would create a bigger injection hole and use a drain buster so that I could inject it all in one go. These are good examples of problem solving.
However my second attempt was a disaster - the silicone was pouring out of the mould and would not fill. This was frustrating as it was a total waste of silicone. Pete advised me to use wet clay around the top of the mould and to tighten the bolts tight before I injected the silicone rather than afterwards.
The below photo was my third attempt at injecting:
Annoyingly, possibly due to the stress of trying to run my pieces, I did not take a picture of the outcome of this injection. However about 90% of the mould filled however 10% did not. By this point I was out of ideas and running out of time as I only had a day until filming. Wayne suggested using a mix of thixo and sillicone and smoothing it into the mould. Thixo is a thickening agent which will turn the silicone into a buttery consistency which can be smoothed in. He warned me that there was a chance that this would not work.
It did not cure, even after a lot of hairdrying. It was quite sticky and I decided that it was better to just wipe it away. It was only the corner of my jaw and I decided it would be best to try and conceal it by stretching that side a little.
After shooting my film, I needed to run another face piece for my assessment. My face piece for the film had a bad edge at the top of it which I was not happy with. Before running it, I inspected the mould and realised there were some flat areas between the mould and the flashing which may have been causing me to have no blending edge. I decided to build up these areas with car body filler.
I then ran the piece again. It was the best run yet however still had minimal blending edge and there was no cap plastic around the eyes. I then realised that when spraying in your cap plastic, you need to spray between 8 - 10 layers of cap plastic as it is a fine mist and requires more layers.
Although this face piece was useable, I decided that I would run the piece for the 5th time, ensuring that there was 10 layers of cap plastic sprayed in. The blending edge around the head was slightly better but still not great. I did however have a nice blending edge around the eyes which I had not had in previous runs.
Although I used a lot of material, I felt it was good practice and my confidence grew each time I injected my mould. The first 4 times, I injected the mould with an assistant and started off panicky, however the 5th time I was on my own and was very relaxed.
Things I would consider - Perhaps my bolts were still not tight enough - causing a bad blending edge? Perhaps the mould was a bad mould and was causing the bad edge - in future I will take my time mouldmaking,.
I put bleeder holes in the back of my mould as I figured that this would be where air bubbles would be most likely. I put them in the back as I thought that would be a good idea in terms of being less noticable when I cut them off the piece. However, because I was injecting my piece on its back, rather than by gravity, it made more sense to to have the bleeder holes in the front of the ear rather than the back. I therefore had to fill the bleeder holes in the back of the ear with carbody filler and re-frill them in the front.
I have learnt from this project that, as I am using a 2mm drill bit for the bleeders, the silicone that I need to cut off the piece is so small that it is not noticeable. Therefore I should not worry about where on the mould I am putting the bleeders in terms of aesthetics.
SILICONE BALD CAP/EARS
I put wet clay all around the edges of my mould just to ensure that no silicone would spill out of the edges, like my face mould earlier on. This was important as it was such a big pour (over 1kg) and I only had one shot at it due to the time restrictions of shooting my film.
I had weighed the clay from my sculpt as 750 g and then added on an extra 200 g so had 950g of silicone with pigment and flock ready to syringe. It turned out that this was not enough and I had to mix up another 300g - this was stressful and we ended up putting more flock in the mix.
My silicone bald cap demoulded easily and came out with no issues apart from a couple of air bubbles in the ears. I was very happy about this as I could not afford for this piece to not work.
I planned to use my silicone bald cap for my shoot as well as my assessment. This was because it was not encapsulated and did not need a blending edge as it went underneath my face piece. This meant that if all went well, I would be able to use the piece more than once. This meant I needed to be very careful with the piece.
I was happy with the small seam that was on my piece. I spent a long time building my clay wall and ensuring it had a sharp edge along the sculpt which I feel helped give me a better seam.
However I was a bit stuck with how to get rid of the seam that was there. I used some small sharp scissors however could still not get rid of the seam. I had a look online but found that I needed cabo-sil - a material I did not have. This was bad planning on my part as I had not considered the seaming process.
These pictures show my mould to begin with and the flat area between the main mould and the flashing. They also show the areas I added car body filler.
NECK PIECE
The first time I ran this neck piece, I did it late at night and I did not realise that I had placed the board on a piece of clay which meant that it was not flat. This is not ideal for a flat piece.This meant that the silicone was running into my cap plastic on one side. This therefore meant that one side would not have as good a blending edge as the other. Other than that, there was no other problem with the neck piece and I was really happy with how it looked.
The second time I ran the piece, I ensured that it was on a completely flat surface and there was no problem with the piece. The piece had a very nice blending edge the second time round.
One difficulty I did have, was that my scraper was a little small for the size of the mould and it was difficult to get an even scrape. This did not effect the piece however.