DissectedLeg

From Simreal

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At Haunted Trails 2004 we wanted to do an up-close and gory station. So we decided to create a dissected leg for it! The actor was on the usual table with a cutout and his legs were replaced with the sculpture.

All of my silicons and rubbers came from Smooth-On, and my Orange Oil from The Chemistry Store. Sculpey is expensive and I wanted a LOT of it, so I tracked down some cheap bulk Sculpey at Midwest Clay. I used the better part of 48lbs overall. About 15 to 20 pounds was used for "dirty" tasks like mold walls and the like. Most of the rest went into the leg sculpture!

Supplies

• Sculpey
• Brush-On 35 and 60
• Plati-Paste
• Dragon Skin or Eco-Flex (I used a mix of both)
• Silc Pig pigments, mix and use as needed
• Orange Oil (d-Limonene, for cleanup)
• Paint brushes

Sculpture

First, make a sculpture of the leg. I can't help you on this, really -- I just faked it.

I bought several anatomy books with pictures and used them for reference. One book had photos (which I photocopied and stuck around the walls), the other book had drawings. The drawings were more useful for sculptural details while the photos gave a better idea of texture and coloring.

Mold

The mold was easy to make, though it took a lot of rubber. Probably about two gallons (a gallon batch of rubber actually contains two one-gallon containers).

I put one layer of Brush-On 35 and then a bunch of layers of Brush-On 60. I made this mold thick, learning the lesson of the brain and other BodyParts.

Of course, I neglected to spray the clay with mold release. When I removed the model from the mold, a bunch of clay stuck, leaving me with a cleanup job that took several hours to complete. So remember kids, ALWAYS use mold release even if you don't think you need to.

With the rubber cured, I planned out how I would place the mother mold. I decided that I could make it work with three sections; two would lock into the undercuts (which is never fun). Note the lines drawn onto the mold. I actually plotted several patterns before I found one I liked.

I was careful to build the edges of the shell thick and square so I could use c-clamps to lock the mold back together. I even embedded big craft sticks to help define the edges.

Cast

I cast the leg in solid silicon, which is the easy way to go but FAR too expensive. The hard, but cheap, way would be to create a core to set into the mold, making most of the casting out of air. This void could then be filled with something less expensive than silicon or even polyurethane. Something like packing peanuts, or I dunno, dryer lint (kidding!).

Of course, I was also casting this around a skeleton. I love skeletons.

The result was a really uninteresting red rubber leg.

Finish

The real beauty of this prop only became evident when it was painted. All of the painting was done with colored silicon. When I wanted the color to stay in place, I thickened it with Thi-Vex. For the dark washes and other more fluid applications, I left the silicon un-thickened.

I took my coloring ideas from both imagination and the color anatomical references.

The finishing silicon was painted on with decent brushes. Before the stuff sets you can clean it off with orange oil -- natures own perfect solvent. And it makes your workshop smell citrus fresh! Of course, if you breath the stuff, it irritates your lungs... so wear protective gear and keep the ventilation up.

Note that the finaly pictures don't show the final amount of blood. I didn't feel the room was bloody enough, so I supplemented the paint blood (shown here) with ample quantities of theatrical blood. This stuff dries to a hard, tacky, sugary mess. Unfortunately, guests kept sticking to the walls.