Pasithea

Okay, I guess this isn't so much to look at yet, but it's a surprisingly long amount of work. This is a hard sculpey model of the parts of WireHead that will be made out of binary cold foam. I decided to make this part a hard model so that I could recast it if needed. Her head and hands will be made of clay so that I can maximize their expressiveness.

I think this model needs some cleanup. The left boot is just slightly higher than the right. That shows up a more obviously in this photo than it does on the actual model. I'll have to remember that. Photo the model from real camera angles to get a better perspective on how it looks. what else? I will probably recast the body. I ment to impress cloth against the sculpey before I baked it to texture her coveralls, and I also ment to put on pockets and a belt. Sheesh. I got way too far ahead of myself. I'm going to write a task-list first thing before I start tomorrow so that I don't end up losing any more steps. The boots are pegged into the legs so I could do that without too much trouble. Other than that, I'm basically happy with the model. She's my leggiest model to date so I'm a little worried about that, but the lightness of the foam body should keep it from being a serious problem.

The next step is to make a plaster negative of the body. I've never done a break-apart moulde before so I'm a little worried about how it will turn out. I probably also need to drill out the ends of her arms and her neck and put some balls of clay there to make space for the wire (without being exact) in the plaster. *sigh* Still never got ahold of an industrial vibrator. I'm really worried about bubbling in a moudle this size. If anyone knows of a way to make plaster bubble less, I'd appreciate input.

After the plaster negative is made, I coat the inside of the moulde with latex. Done this part before and I'm reasonably good at it.

The next step, however, I'm worried about. I need to mount the wire skeleton inside the moulde so that it doesn't wobble around or poke out of the moulde anywhere. I think I am going to make the placeholders on the neck and arms out of bamboo skewer and make them a bit long so I'll have straight 'guides' in my moulde to align the skeleton with. I believe I may also put a plate under the feet and actually use the tie-downs in her feet to hold her in place. That should give me a fairly decent alignment although it doesn't provide a very good guide for the spine. If anyne has experience casting models, I'd really appreciate their experience.

After that, things are easy. Pour in the foam, wait for all the cyanide to outgas, paint the costume, sculpt the clay and that's it.

So far, I'm very happy with the boots. They are double tie-down design (nuts in the heel and toe) The laces are made with a bit of kite string and the rivots are 1/2" straight pins, which both look bootlike, and hold the laces in place very nicely. The other interesting innovation for WireHead will be her hair. I'm going to embed a piece of breadboard in her head and soder all the wires to it and make a wire placement guide. That way, none of them ever fall out during shooting and if one breaks, I can replace it easily. I'm currently looking at some brightly-coloured 12ga wire for her hair but unfortunetely, it's steel stranded wire and not copper solid wire. I _think_ it has enough hold to it that it will work okay (and on the plus side, it would take forever to break) but I wa really hoping to find copper. I'll have to drag Stacey with me to Halted to get her input.

That's all for now!
-Sammi