Ghastly Thoughts: They'll creep up on you...

Happy New Year to all the HMA’rs out there. It was a busy month for us. My wife Lauren owns a small ticketing business here in San Francisco, and with all of the holiday shows that she sells tickets to in the month of December it’s all hands on deck. Several days in December I found myself in Sacramento working Chanticleer concerts or at Grace Cathedral working their Holiday programs. It’s a lot of fun but where did the month go? One thing I did work on this past month was a new commissioned piece for a collector; Mr. Pratt from Creepshow. My task was to try to re-create the prop at the end of the movie where the cockroaches burst out of the chest and the mouth. Sweet huh? I started out with a quick search of the internet to get some photo reference. I have the Grand Illusions book and with a few more photos that I found online, I was off and running… to Douglass and Sturges for clay. Douglass and Sturges is a store here in San Francisco that is an FX guy’s dream. They are a Smooth On distributor and carry all kinds of clays, plaster and foam. I practically live there. When I got to my shop I started the process by building an armature. For this project I used a round wooden base with a cast iron pipe attached with a plumbing flange. The shoulders were bulked out with wire mesh and plaster bandage, the head was nothing more than a loop of armature wire.

On to the clay! A basic rough out is first, setting the eye placement and teeth. I used a set of resin teeth that I sculpted and molded several months ago. I’ll mold the teeth as part of the finished bust and end up with cast latex teeth. The eye forms are castings made from the set of eyes that I will be using in the final finished bust. This is something that is really important; use the same eyes in the sculpture as you are going to use in your final piece if you are using glass eyes.

The next couple of days of work were spent refining the sculpture. Once the sculpture was finished and my client was happy with it, I moved onto molding.

I don’t usually show photos of my molds because I think they are ugly. I’ve seen some beautifully finished molds all geometric in shape. My molds are at least smooth and not a danger to use. I guess when I finally get that call from ADI, Legacy Effects or KNB to work on a movie, I will start taking my time and making perfect molds. I generally use my molds only a couple of times, so the molds and not around long enough to be seen by anyone important. I’m not planning on doing a mold-making seminar with this blog, suffice it to say that after sealing the sculpture, a clay wall is constructed to make one half of the mold at a time. I usually make the back half first so that I can lay the first half down to make the front half of the mold, using gravity to my advantage. Once the mold is complete I let it dry over night.

Next time, Part 2… casting and finishing.

As always, you can find me on the internet at: www.ghastlycreations.weebly.com Or on the Ghastly Creations page on Facebook. Till next time I’ll be here making monsters in my city by the bay.