It took a couple of nights of 8-hour sleep to do it, but I feel almost human again today. When I don't get enough sleep I start accumulating symptoms of depression, which is less than fun.
Hey, I notice that I've been neglecting my log of projects!
Lessee... I may not have mentioned the life-cast of an actor's hand I did a couple of Tuesdays ago. Or maybe I did.
Last week I spent making a variety of nifty things!
With the help of Tall Matt, we made a dozen or so pneumatic gunshot hit simulation reservoir tubes, though the scene they were for dropped off the end of the weekend's shoot.
I made several liters of fake blood using moulage (trauma simulation) blood powder, water, and corn syrup. This appears to be thin in the jar, but comes out vaguely clotted. Which is vaguely disturbing. I'll try to make some un-clotted yet thick blood using straight corn syrup. And I want to modify some of the thin clotty stuff into thick clotty stuff, for jollies.
I used my tombstone trick to make a couple of house signs. Take your text or graphic and print it out really big and reversed (thanks Photoshop!) on your HP laser printer (other brands of toner may or may not work). Place the sheet toner-down on your board or whatever and you can transfer the toner by rubbing the back of the paper with acetone.
Ooh, and the big project was the rocks.
Nice rocks. In fact, these rocks were essentially indistinguishable from real rocks until you touched them.
I started with a collection of rocks from the site, so I could match their structure and coloring. They appeared to have a background color (yellow in some, reddish in others) overlaid with darker greys and browns to make a complex rock-colored pattern.
To get the shapes, I broke up and pressed together rough chunks of Sculpy (of which I had a zillion pounds of left over from previous projects) into rough rock shapes. Roughly speaking. There was no care involved, only breaking and combining.
Then I took plaster bandages, like you use to make a cast for a broken appendage, and put about 1.5 layers of this around the clay. Not too much, because I wanted these to be light and non-damaging to the house when they were thrown at it.
Once that hardened, I used an abrasive cutoff wheel to split the shell. Note it's better to cut the line the long way around the rock and not the short way, so it is easier to get the clay out. And they actually fit back together better when you can place a top on a bottom, rather than trying to bond two sides together. If that makes any sense, which it probably doesn't.
I added another 1.5 layers of plaster bandage to bind the shell halves together, taking care to lay it in random directions so there wasn't an obvious seam line.
The rock has shape now, but has a bad texture. I fixed that by mixing up a thick mixture of hydrostone (a hard plaster that doesn't set too fast) and spackled a thin layer of that over the bandage. The drying the rock shell, the faster the plaster would stiffen up over it! This was handy, since I could smooth the plaster easily with a wet finger once it got stiff (but not hard).
Once that layer did harden, the trusty airbrush laid two layers of smooth color onto the shell, giving the interior color of the rock. I used a browny-golden-yellow that I drifted over to a pinkish-red-brown-gold by adding color as I went along.
Then I took a dark brown paint and spattered the rocks with speckles using a brush and my thumb to riffle the bristles.
By now the rocks are looking pretty good, and in fact some of them would be usable as-is with a light glaze over them to smooth the colors. But I took one more step.
Taking two colors of brown (medium and darker) plus a dirty grey, I painted these on my hand and then smeared this thin, almost dry, layer of paint onto the rock. This darkened the highlights in a rough pattern and turned the rocks into... rocks!
I'll eventually put pictures up on one of the areas of the site, but not today. Or this month. The whole movie will get a section once it is done.
I think that was about it that weekend.
Oh! No, Matt put together some screen frames and I cast some Smash! Plastic into 'em, to poor effect. The humidity (or something, I have a tech call in to the manufacturer) caused the plastic to foam and bubble. This stuff is beginning to piss me off, but I keep trying because, once it is right, it has great characteristics (as I can tell from the good fragments I'm typically left with).
I'm also going to try sugar glass (3.5C sugar, 2C water, 1C corn syrup, heat to 300 degrees). Dammit.