Arts
https://battleswithbitsofrubber.com/ It’s Halloween. A Saturday! A full moon! Also not happening because of Covid. Boo. It’s a damn shame, but I imagine around the world, a lot more horror movies will be watched. I can only hope such mass consumption will drive production to make more stuff as we burn through the back catalogue of shows with a worldwide captive audience. Cutting Edges On appliances, a cutting edge is often employed to mark the boundary of where appliance stops and real skin should begin. With foam and gelatine, the end of the piece was the end of the piece. With silicone appliances, we usually have a cap plastic barrier which extends beyond the silicone edge to provide that nice, melt-to-nothing transition. However, on a lot of flat moulds, we have seen varying takes on how far away a cutting edge should be from the sculpt. We chat about that! Cap Plastic On The Back Of A Piece We also chat about cap plastic on the back of pieces. Usually necessary when a mould and a core is involved, but there are some reasons why it is desirable to not have cap plastic on the back of a piece. For one, often when removing the appliance, the cap plastic will stick better to the skin because of the glue than it does to the back of the appliance. This ‘delamination’ means it takes longer to clean up and can be a pain. Why cap plastic the back at all? Usually two reasons. One reason is deadened/softened silicone is very sticky, so the barrier makes it possible to handle the piece during demoulding. The other is to allow ‘cheaper’ water-based adhesives (as opposed to the more expensive silicone adhesives) to bond better to the piece. Let’s not forget that silicone is a material much used for moulds precisely because not much sticks to it. Including most glues and makeup. By having a barrier on the surface which is not actually silicone at all, but cap plastic, suddenly a whole world of things can be used on the makeup and blendable edges are possible. The sheer joy! So, when running flat pieces, now I don’t bother with cap plastic on the back. I did it, like many do, out of habit and seeing it down without really asking myself why it was necessary. By spraying more cap plastic on the back, we essentially double the edge thickness and it’s an extra step in the job. We talk through some notions of why it can be a problem, and how one might get around it. Podcast recommendation Check out a great podcast I just discovered via Kiana ‘Freakmo’ Jones called Red Carpet Rookies. In particular, episode #5 with Bill Corso talking about digital makeup. It’s a great show done by someone who cares about the subject, and I’d add it to your podcast subscriptions if you dig film chat. So, getting the horror on with audio books to keep us spooked during the workshop hours…Salem’s Lot and the The Exorcist was a double bill which put me in the right mood for some Halloween Horror Movies this weekend. Sculpting a vampire face whilst listening to William Peter Blatty read Regan’s tirades at Father Karras felt like a peak moment of Halloween fun. --------------------------------------------------- Many thanks as always for your time checking the stuff out. You can email us direct at stuartandtodd@gmail.com or leave us a voice message directly on our site. If you enjoy this podcast and got something out of it, would you do us a solid and tell just one more person about us? Send them a link and help us grow! -Stuart & Todd https://battleswithbitsofrubber.com/