I just felt like making some quality horns I guess? I'm starting out with sculpey and plan to make a mold and cast them in something more translucent. I could have started out working with translucent sculpey I guess, but this way I can just work with materials I've already got, without having to actually buy something for kind of a bogus project.
Sollux has two pairs of horns since he's the character that represents Gemini, one larger pair and one smaller. Since I'm making a mold I only have to make one of each horn, and I can cast it more than once.
I started out by drawing what I thought the right size was for each horn and cutting it out, then putting it on my head and checking to see if the size was right. This is just a guide so I don't go completely out of whack on scale and end up with giant horns!
I used tin foil to make the base because since sculpey needs to be baked, it has to have a core to work on that can also be baked. Tin foil is really not an ideal material for smoothness, but it serves its purpose if you work at it for a few minutes. Also make sure to make the tin foil models SMALLER than you want the horns.
Roll out the sculpey, I did pretty thin since I didn't have a whole lot of orange to work with ^^; I also made the tin foil base accordingly, only slightly smaller than the finished size I wanted.
Just rolled onto the horn! It looks pretty terrible right now, but we're working on it.
To make sure it will look like it's coming out of someone's head you want it to have crisp corners, not rounded! I do a lot of smoothing sculpey with a knitting needle actually. I never had much luck pushing or running my fingers over the clay to blend it, so I use the knitting needle and 'roll' it over the clay.
Mostly smooth now and pretty close to what I had drawn up before! At this point if I wanted the finished horns to be smooth I would bake, sand and finish, but I wanted to play with texture. Since I plan to cast these in a translucent material small lumps will also be less of an issue. The sculpey I used is very opaque, so any imperfection in the surface is very visible.
More on texture tomorrow!
The lumpy horns bother me a lot too. I went to a convention last month with so many lumpy horns...though a lot of them also sadly had bad face paint. There were only a few who had really good horns and makeup. I hate being judgemental but there were so many people I wanted to go up to and just fix their wigs because their hair would be visual among other things. Wearing a wig properly is one of the few things that isn't difficult but people still managed to mess it up. Though I can understand for guys that it can be hard to find a wig big enough, and some sellers won't even bother to tell you how much they stretch.
ReplyDeleteI'm very interested to see what a translucent horn will look like. It would be very unique for sure. Hm....I would like to eventually try my hand at casting too.
I know exactly what you mean, I mean no disrespect to cosplayers especially since I don't cosplay, I just wish they could all be great!
DeleteCasting things is easy, it's the mold making that's hard ;P