Pre-colouring the prosthetic

In order to reduce my application time I decided it would be best to pre-colour my prosthetic as much as possible; allowing me to take a little more time and care on the colour and texturing than I would in an assessment when I will have much tighter time constraints.

I had initially planned to pre-colour my piece using the homemade silicone paint technique that Pete had showed us earlier in the year. This involved mixing oil paints, bathroom silicone and a naphtha based product (panel wipe/lighter fluid/white spirit), however, I encountered a number of difficulties when I came to actually do this. Firstly, the 'panel wipe' that Paige and I had ordered from the internet was not mixing with either the silicone or the oil paints, which we soon discovered was due to the fact that it was in fact spirit based rather than naphtha based. Once we had been to get some lighter fluid to use in the place of the useless panel wipe, I began mixing up some brown tones to use on the piece. It was then that I encountered the second of my problems. I had brought two airbrushes in with me to use on the piece; one was my expensive Iwata professional airbrush, however, I did not want to run the risk of ruining this on its first use by putting silicone through it, I had therefore purchased a cheap airbrush online to use a test run. Unfortunately, when I attempted putting through the freshly mixed paint, nothing came out of the cheaper airbrush at all. I thinned down the mixture using lighter fluid 3 or 4 times in an attempt to get it to work, but to no avail. I was still unwilling to use my professional airbrush for silicone and was rapidly running out of time to get the piece coloured before my assessment. I decided that instead of wasting yet more time trying to get the airbrush to work, I would have to go on with skin illustrators instead.

I was impressed with how well flicking the skin illustrators created an even coverage across the face as a base, however, I found that the more IPA that was mixed in, which gave a more even coverage, but also resulted in some drips appearing. This was quite a difficult problem to overcome and it became necessary to wait for sections to dry before applying more colour to minimise the risk of this happening.   I found that a mixture of colours in my skin illustrator palette and a specific Grunge illustrator palette worked well together, providing all the reddy/brown tones that I needed. Once I was happy with the base colour I could begin to go in with smaller brushes, both flicking and painting to create the skin texture that I had envisaged. I noticed on a lot of the Orcs in the Lord of the Rings films had a mottled, ripple-like texture to their skin that I really liked and was keen to attempt to recreate. I began with the forehead and gradually dabbed on and blended a beige, dark brown and yellow ocre colour. I was really happy with how this area had gone, although I found it very difficult to recreate this texture on other areas of the face and was not quite as happy with certain sections.

It was only after I had completed the colouring on the face, neck, ears and shoulders (I decided not to focus too much on the back of the head and neck as this would be covered by the wig) that I discovered the downside of using skin illustrators rather than silicone paints. As I pulled on an area of the prosthetic and it stretched slightly I noticed that the colour had cracked, a problem that can occur when too much illustrator is applied. I was now a little concerned as I was aware that I would have to stretch the prosthetic quite considerably in order to get it onto the actor's head in my assessment.