Prosthetics, blood and gore

I've been working on my special fx unit for my HND and learning new skills and techniques.

One of these was making our own prosthetic pieces and applying them. Now this is all good and well in an everyday, classroom setting but what happens when you have to do it via online classes and tutorials 🙈

The process was totally new to me, during my level 3 qualification we never looked at making our own pieces and used mainly latex to create injuries and wounds. This meant that to the untrained eye the work looked good but it wasn't necessarily amazing.

However from learning these new skills and techniques such as flat plate moulding, application and blending techniques and colour and shading I feel that the outcome is much better and far more professional.

My flat plate mould wasn't perfect, the encapsulation didn't work as planned as you can see below and meant that I wasn't left with much of a blending edge to seemlessly blend the edges of my piece. It was frustrating for me as it took a while to remove the piece from the mould, I think that using more mould release spray would have made this an easier process and is something I will try next time, as well as taking more time applying the layers of baldiez to ensure encapsulation is done more effectively.

The space around my piece is also rather big so making a smaller wall around the piece would give me a smaller blending edge as such a big space isn't needed for a piece of this size, but we live and learn!

I found applying the piece a lot easier than I though it was going to be, I used pros-aide to adhere the piece to my skin and was amazed at the hold it gave, when using latex in the past its got really messy and starts to lift but the pros-aide stuck really well and the piece didn't lift at all. I decided to use a product called artex by Kryolan to blend the edges due to me not having much blending edge. This worked really well and gave the piece more adhesion to my skin too. There are other products I could have used to do this but I had artex available and at hand so it worked well given the situation of home learning I was in, I didn't have access to other products so easily.

You can see from the images above what a difference the artex made in making the piece blend into the skin.

Next came the colouring and shading, this part of the process I wasn't as confident with, I used reference images to try and recreate the authenticity of the look. I used alcohol paints as they are buildable and easy to remove, I do find them difficult to blend as they dry so quickly. I may try using different types of paint to see if they are easier to blend or try airbrushing the skin texture but I think that this would make it look unrealistic as it gives too much coverage, this is something I'm going to have a play around with and experiment with in the future.

Overall I felt really proud of the work I achieved but I know that I could improve, there is always room for improvement and development, the thing I find most difficult is not doing too much, not adding a bit more blood or more shading, as its easy to take it over the top and make it worse 🙈

Please feel welcome to pop your suggestions and thoughts in the comments I would love to hear some feedback!

Stay tuned for more blog posts on my home learning journey, let's all share our skills and positivity with each other during this difficult time 💕