Creating My Hybrid | Sculpting and Moulding

When creating my sculptures for my hybrid, I wanted to create horns so at first I made them going into the clay. Which when I was doing I thought it was going well, apart from that I wanted the horns to be bent slightly then I realised that if I were to do it.  It could go either way, with the fact that it might work complete or it could fail badly. In the end I just decided to go with small straight horns. Eventually I finished what I thought were going to what I apply to my model. However when I arrived in my lecture, I was discussing my sculpture to one of my house mates, Nancy but upon talking , we were discussing if I made the sculptures right. Fortuntetly I had a meeting with Kat, one of my lecturers for the special effects unit. Talking to her about my sculpture as I was so confused if I had done it right, but I hadn't. The way I had made it , when it was time to apply to skin the horns would be going into the skin, instead of protruding out of the skin. So after I had that meeting with Kat I got straight on with re sculpting, so that I would still have enough time to pour silicone over my sculpture.

When I was re sculpting, making the horns stand up out of the clay, I also made a little dent around it with a ring around as this will make it look like it coming out of the skin more smoothly. I wanted the horns to be bend slight and now that I am making the correctly I can have a bend,however if it has too much of an over hand I will not be able to remove the sculpture once the silicone has set. So my little horns only have the tinniest little bit of a bend. Below are the images of my sculpture and then when I moulded them.

When making the silicone mould I was a bit nervous as this was something I was doing alone, I know I had already done it by myself but it was when both Kat and Sue were in the lesson so they were there to help if anything went wrong. I managed to do it by myself so easy I really don't know why I was nervous. I knew that I would have to make quite a big quantity of it as the sculpture stood up, so I decided to make 80g of silicone A which meant that I would have to measure out 80g of silicone B, the first lot I made was fine, and I thought I had made enough, so off I went and mixed it together quickly, tapped it on the side to make sure any big air bubbles got out and started to pour over my first sculpture, and kept pouring over it until the horn was covered, unfortunately there was not enough mixture to cover my second one. 

I had to make more and this sort of panicked me as I knew I did not have long to create the next mixture, I also wasn't sure whether to use the same cup that I just used or use another one and I knew I had to be quick so I just went for it, the worse thing that could happen is that it didn't set, but as I was pouring out silicone A, I thought to myself that it will be fine the silicones will just get mixed together so using the same cup will be fine. ( and it was!).

I have to admit I did rush this bit and in hind sight I probably shouldn't as the silicone tubs could have been contaminated so quickly, but in the back of my mind was just the fact that I needed to get this mixture done. I measured out 60g of both silicone A and B mixed, tapped and poured over the other mixture, and I honestly thought that, this mixture would cover it, and I was nearly right. It just managed to cover it with a few centimetres over it. After the little stress I had over making the last little mixture I was more willing to redo the whole thing than making a little more mixture in a hurry. Because I made the second lot of mixture in a hurry I was a little worried to if my mixture would set. Thankfully it did and I managed to pull the silicone away from sculpture however it did pull the horns off but they came straight out of the silicone.

After having my meeting with Kat and discussing my hybrid idea, I thought about making another piece to stick onto the skin. Because my hybrid is half land and half sea creature I wanted to create gills on one side of the skin. I have to admit I hadn't don't much research into that yet so that is definitely on my to do list at some point, I know I will get it done but have no clue when. I was sculpting these whilst my other moulds were setting, unfortunately I did not have enough time to stick a barrier around my mould or even do the mixture to go over it, so this is at the top of my priority list for Monday when I can go into uni and complete it. Below are the images of my gill sculpture.