Not Completely Dead, Part I

Just a little something I've been working on and off again for the past four months. It's a Dragon Priest mask from Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, an item that I quickly became enamored with when I acquired my first one in-game.

From start to end:

MID to LATE NOVEMBER: First initial sculpt. I only had enough clay to do one half of the thing (sculpted over an old blank party mask).
I could go on forever regaling tales of late nights and stuffy conditions, hunched over a desk sculpting what should've been very easy things (that were really not as easy as I originally thought), but I'll surmise by saying that the cheek alone took me 12 hours straight to sculpt, refine, get upset, destroy, re-sculpt, refine, smooth, gave up, and move on.

EARLY DECEMBER: Having very limited resources and quickly getting fed up, I covered the original half sculpt in silicone rubber (Smooth On Rebound 25, to be exact) to create a mold for what would produce a plastic version to take its place. Using Plasti-Paste Trowable plastic, another Smooth On product, I fashioned a shell around the rubber mold which was encasing the half-sculpt. Once cured, I took the original sculpt out the rubber mold, and destroyed it to reuse the clay to make the other half. I set that aside and used Smooth-On Smooth Cast (40D, if I recall) to create the plastic positive and have it take the original half-sculpt's place.

At the time this photo was taken, I had spent a full week shaping and refining areas to make it as symmetrical looking as I possibly could, before moving on to do the other eye and cheek. A real pain that symmetry business; having to re-do all the same stuff again. Faults and all.

LATE DECEMBER: A couple more weeks spent shaping and refining later.

 

 JANUARY: Shaped and refined some more...

  

 FEBRUARY: At some point later, I got fed up and set to work on the mother mold and negative of the final clay sculpt. Same processes as before but, again, having little resources, I had to improvise.
 I reused my first rubber mold for the half sculpt to help build the final negative. It sounded right, but after pulling apart the rubber from the original sculpt (of which the sculpt did not survive), I realized immediately that there was a hideous seam line running down the middle of the rubber mold: disjointing one half of the mask with the other. I blew it off thinking nothing of it, "Some sanding and that'll be alright. Onto making the mother."

Failing to make a sturdy mother mold, when I separated the mother from the rubber mold, the left half of the mother mold broke. Remade another half and got to casting the full thing before I got fed up. I had an old belt and used it as a strap to secure the halves together and away we went casting in polyurethane resin. 

Another thing I failed to realize, when I tried to salvage the original clay sculpt to give the floppy rubber mold a foundation to keep shape, was that one side (the left) wasn't curved inward as far as the other, so when I pulled my first cast, it came out with a hideous seam line that ran right down the middle and one side was too flat. Stretched outward more horizontally than curving back like a good mask should. However, being that I made a fairly large sculpt (considering the race of beings that wore these masks, Nords, are noticeably larger than average humans), it compensated this mistake fairly well.

 Attempting to salvage what I had, I took this cast to have an appointment with Dr. Emel. Sanding away my mistakes and further refining things like the chin, cheek, lower jaw, face, overall thickness of the piece took about 5-6 hours.

MARCH: More sanding. More refining. More Apoxy Sculpt (I honestly don't know how I made anything before without this stuff). More sanding. More refining.

PRIMED, PAINTED, and COMPLETED AS OF 03/11/12

Enjoy these grand, glorious, glamorous cell phone pictures.

Priming and laying a coat of nickel colored spray paint was easy enough (after some light sanding to make sure the primer stuck properly) but the details and weathering were achieved through a technique I picked up involving an old sock. After the base colors were laid on, (via sock and spray paint method), to darken areas and add dirt, grime, and all these other things to make it look old; simple and basic painting methods were applied. Wet washing and dry brushing being the main two techniques.

However, to really get that really authentic look of weathering, you can't paint it on. As I was painting, I was constantly scuffing and scratching the mask with my fingers and my car keys, and at one point, I was rubbing sand into it. Season to taste and then add a coat of crystal clear acrylic for protection (and to dull exposed bits of extra shiny paint) and I've got myself a Dragon Priest Mask.