HandOfSomeone

From Simreal

Yeah, I made a hand. I did a lifecasting with Body Double fast-set. I didn't make a mother mold for this, since I wanted the hand to bloat a little bit when cast, to make it puffy. It actually held its shape very nicely.

Then I cast it with a vaguely flesh-colored Eco-Flex, which is a wonderfully soft silicon that is now my favorite body-part material. (Oooh! They have a new mold-making silicon! I love that place...)

Nothing really sticks to silicon, though in theory you can mix up a batch of silicon and thin it to death using Toluene (an evil substance I don't recommend to anyone). In the past, I've painted the inside of the skin, which works well. But I've just not been able to make a silicon paint work on the outside of a prop yet. I'm still trying.

So I used makeup to color the hand! Yup. And it worked nicely, though these pictures don't do it justice, as usual. A flesh-tone base (in several shades to give depth) to bring the hand up to match the actor. Then the bruise kit to accentuate the veins and give bruising around the wrist. I used white creme makeup on the fingernails, which worked beautifully.

I used translucent powder to set the makeup.

I find that silicons and makeup jobs are very sensitive to how you light them, since they are translucent. Different lighting conditions show up very differently.

The final hand had really wobbly fingers, so I took lengths of 18 gauge stainless steel wire and used pliers to ram then through the finger tips into the fingers. This worked really well, though it hurt to watch the process. Ouch.

After it was done for the movie, I decided I wanted to preserve the makeup coloring and also add a little more depth to the texture of the hand.

I mixed up a small batch of eco-flex and added some black/blue color to it to make a translucent grey. I stuck the hand on a stick, fingers up, and painted a thin layer of this all over it.

Then I used a shop towel to dab most of the silicon off, taking care over time to lighten the puddles that formed as the hand stood there.

This filled in crevices with grey and put a thin layer over the makeup, locking it into place. I used baby powder to take the shine and tack off of the silicon.

By the time I did this, some of the makeup had worn off, there were drips of blood on the fingers, and so on. The grey also muted the flesh tones a bunch, giving a translucent layer over them. This, plus the change in lighting when I took the picture, makes this hand look significanlty different.

In life, this hand looks significantly better, too. More dead. I wish I had thought of that before we shot the footage.

Wow. That does look really good.

Okay, here is another hand I made from that same mold. You can see the scar line across the back of it where the mold tore and was repaired. There are also some bubbles in the mold that made some flaws.

I did discover one thing, from a hint I read somewhere... a hot soldering iron can be used to help remove thin flashing. The heat seems to soften/damage the silicon, and the thin flashing takes the damage much faster the the heavy body... and makes it possible to make a clean removal of it.

I made this for the actor it was taken from and who knows? Maybe I'll even give it to him. I colored it more "dead", and it turned out darker than I planned... but I'm pretty happy with it anyway.

These pictures show it a bit dusty still, the powder has not all been dusted off yet.