The Male Harley Quin - Whaaaaaat?

The same client that has me working on a Casey Jones Mask also has another piece he wants made. This one is going to be very interesting to work on. I am not always happy to see some lanky dude crossplaying a power-puff girl with his package hanging out but this is one of those cross-plays that I can appreciate. The guy dresses up as a male version of Harley Quinn. Before you think of skin tight jumpsuit and pom poms instead check out a picture of him in his attire

so hes over at my place checking out the Casey mask and of course he brought a case of Newcastle. And I had a big bottle of Makers Mark. at one point im in the garage working on casey, drunk as a dog. Pretty much a blur the rest of the night. I wake up the next morning and he tells me "so dude were you serious about me coming over this sunday to work." Of course I am not going to be caught as if I was unaware so I say, yea sure come on over. Come to find out it was his harley quinn mask that I had drunkenly agreed to do so without further ado enjoy :)

so we ended up buying the alginate acrobat, smooths ons alginate acrobat is a non toxic compound that you use to do lifecasting, the benefit of the acrobat over the standard alginate is that it is fiber reinforced to help the alginate not run all over the place. As you can see I failed to mix this nearly enough for the fibers to be evenly dispersed throughout the alginate. The mold ended up working fine but I received non of the benefits that normally accompany alginate acrobat, instead it just slurried all over the place and I did my best to keep the majority of it near his head. The end result was a well "plastered" face and residue left all over my old computer chair.

After this was finished I made a plaster cast of his face and began sculpting once it was dry enough.

there was another image of the finished sculpt all smoothed out. The clay I use is an oil based clay called plasteline. Its fairly inexpensive and bricks of it can be bought from local art supply stores like Michaels and Joanns. A problem with the oil based clay is smoothing it out for casting, I have found that some paint prep spray which is usually used to clean off oil residue from a surface before painting works amazingly well. This depends how detailed your clay sculpt is but for this mask, its so simple I actually just kept spraying the whole mask with the spray to melt the surface of the clay and I would smooth it out with tools/fingers. It works extremely well and because the spray itself is not an oil it doesnt cause problems later on when painting.

I apologize for not taking more pictures of this process, but you end up covered in orange goo and I like my electronic devices enough not to cake them in the stuff.

I will post pictures when I finish this, for now I need to go finish casey jones for wondercon.

Casey Jones - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Hi all, Ive got a new commission to show. I was approached by someone a while back whom had interest in commissioning a Casey Jones Mask for Wondercon.

The client was unsure of which version he had so I had to recommend taking a look at Dave Rapoza's fantastic concept art

I really sold the idea to him a little while later when I created a concept renders for him in zbrush.

the first step was to do the unwrapping for pepakura,

From this point the mask was reinforced with urethane resin, I used smooth cast to reinforce the interior of the pepakura. With a master I like to build up the thickness of the interior of the pepakura so I can sand the peaks of the pep down.

the mouth was too long for the client so it was trimmed to fit the proportions of his face better

after a great deal of bondo, sanding, and more bondo

and primered

some more contouring and here is a quick shot of the client testing it

heres a final shot before molding

ill post a pic of the molding later

final product after airbrushing

happy customer 

Shoppy Stuff

 

This is the new shop toy, its a dewalt band saw with a custom

built frame to support it upright. The table is 3/4" acrylic.

I decided to go with this model because I liked the option of

being able to cut many different materials, as well as the portability,

This thing could fit in my passenger seat if I wanted.

 Cold rolled steel costs so damned much, this is going to be used for the

tow hitch I am fabricating for the fj, should have it finished soon.

 Triple Square bit's. Many Volkswagens have triple square bolts in terrible spots such as the Head Bolts. Imagine tearing a complete engine apart with metric sockets just to find headbolts with these crazy looking things.

 I am going for the younger Geppeto look

This is what my converted third car garage looks like, their is quite a bit more surface area to work with then visible here but all in all I feel quite lucky to have a space like this to call my own.



This here is Hieronymous Bosch, she decided one day that she would live in my garage. I did my best to deter her from staying but when my brother came home for the holidays I noticed she now had a little brown house to be a lazy little monster in.

One of the coolest things ive seen, this is what MoldMax silicon looks like when you put it under a temendous amount of vacuum, as the atmospheric pressure inside the chamber decreases bubbles that would be pin sized under normally pressure balloon until they are big enough that they rise to the surface of the silicon and POP. it is quite incredible to watch.

 

 

 

I recently was asked by a friend of mine to help him cast some custom stands for the Beats By Dre Headphones. For the rapid production we decided to make three silicon molds of the original stand and cast them out of colored Crystal Clear resin by Smooth On. We achieved the different colors by mixing the resin with different combinations of dye's. One very important factor to obtaining a truely crystal clear finish with the resin is that all of the air bubbles have to be removed from the resin before pooring. To accomplish this we needed to build a vaccuum degassing chamber. The yellow reservoir tank was purchased to be used with a vacforming table that is currently being built.

 

 

New mini color gun, definately looking forward to laying down some paint with this, I dislike rattle cans, they are a waste of money and the final product is trash compared to using a high quality automotive paint on pretty much any project. Once you have used a polyurethane paint you quickly dislike most of the enamels often found in spraypaint.

I cut out a sticker on my plotter and now its on my car, YAY

 



I bought one of these to go through and wire up a couple of new circuits. All of this fancy hardware of mine need their own dedicated circuits so I dont burn my house down. (anymore than I already have)

This is a vacforming table I built, it has been updated since this picture, ill take some new ones for you tomorrow.

 

Spartan 300

Mass Effect M8 Avenger