Class Project: Cad Bane Prosthetic

[The Sweatshop]

As of posting this, the assignment is submitted but I’ll spread out my posts to get everyone’s feedback at each step.

This semester I’m taking Advanced Makeup for theater which so far the focus is on special fox makeup and prosthetics. Are first assignment is “creature prosthetics” and we always have to submit our projects with several references for what our intended aim was. While discussing the outline of the assignment a fellow student asked how close can we get to copying our inspiration, and the teacher said for this assignment, it’s fine to try and copy a design exactly. Star Wars it is then!

I looked through the aliens and decided on Cad Bane from Book of Boba Fett. There is great reference from Celebration and it allows me to do a complete face transformation. Bonus is my partner/model for the assignment is a huge Star Wars fan himself and couldn’t wait to walk around as Cad.

Let’s start with face casting.

Unfortunately I hadn’t thought of taking more pictures of this process while doing it.
The steps we took were
Put on swim cap
Vaseline exposed hair including eyebrows and facial hair
Mixed and applied goopy alginate to catch the details leaving hole open near nostrils so I don’t kill the model
Then covered the alginate with overlapping plaster bandages for rigid support.

Once cured we popped them off and immediately started mixing the plaster for casting the faces. We didn’t have anymore time to watch plaster dry so we left them for next weeks class to de mold them.

Jump to the next week, my mold of my partners face was pretty intact, a lot of noses were broke but mine survived, thankfully. Also because I was too excited to start on my sculpt I didn’t take a bare faced picture. As this build goes on, I do get better at documenting the process, promise.

The clay we used for the sculpt is plastecine/plastilina.

 

[DennisFett1142]

That class sounds slightly more fun than the IT Strategy for Leaders course I'm currently muddling through! Excited to see the progress! Love the look of the clay face so far.

 

[The Sweatshop]

That class sounds slightly more fun than the IT Strategy for Leaders course I'm currently muddling through! Excited to see the progress! Love the look of the clay face so far.

Ask and you shall receive!

I had bought some red mirror sunglasses to do a similar rigging to how they did for BoBF, but after scaling my reference to my actors head, my lenses were a little smaller. They still would’ve worked but I think I came up with a better solution than even Disney, but we’ll get to that later.

Some background, I’m a great procrastinator. My best work is down the day before, so I needed to have this sculpt down and ready 10 hours before my I picked up where I left off. So all these upcoming photos were right before class, for which I was 2 hours late on a 4 hour class, but once I arrived to class, all was forgiven.

My glasses seemed too small so I grabbed the closest thing in arms reach that would work as a substitute at least for the sculpting aspect, which were safety glasses since they confirmed to the head much better that any other glasses and the lens were pretty close the the Disney made ones. Better lenses will be acquired/made after this step.

Because I only have a half head cast, I decided to clip the arms short on the safety glasses so the sculpt could still lay flat while sculpting and when I get to the mold making.

Unfortunately my initial modeling was mostly for not, as I hadn’t installed the glasses to model around I had to lift most of it off.

This is around 4am and my class is at 11am. Unfortunately I got this far and I didn’t grab enough clay from class to be even close to doing this sculpt. And to add more of a time crunch. All the Walmarts in my area aren’t 24hours anymore so I have to kill 2 hours until 6am to buy more clay. In the upcoming pictures the new clay is white instead of gray, so it’s hard to distinguish clay vs plaster until the end.

Aaaaaand BAM! I got here and pretty much ready for pore texture.

Here is some. I didn’t have any idea how to do pores, so I grabbed a plastic fork and pretty neat ch played drums until satisfied.

This is pretty much done and I took it to class 2 hours late, but the teacher was quite impressed, ‍. Right before starting the mold I added more pores and tweaked the eyelid shape a bit since I wasn’t 100% ready.

Let me know what you think thus far.

 

[DennisFett1142]

Incedible! Love the safety glasses idea!

 

[The Sweatshop]

Incedible! Love the safety glasses idea!

Big thanks, the safety glasses gets even better later!

 

[The Sweatshop]

Mold making time. Other students used smooth-cast to do smaller molds for scars and such but me bringing in my full face sculpt really stressed my teacher out, . She got pretty nervous that we might ruin my work in any of the upcoming steps. She recommended that I do a silicone mold. I used Rebound and applied 4-5 layers to make sure the thickness was substantial. I did make my first mistake of not using a mold release, but I got lucky since it is silicone, it didn’t permanently stick to the clay sculpt or plaster cast.

Days later I made a mother mold using Plasti-paste. It’s a epoxy resin with fiber already embedded for strength. This time I did remember mold release…

I used the whole kit for this part also 4-5 layers.

Now onto the new eyes. These safety glasses were super cheap ~$3 so I got some extra but I couldn’t find any that already had red tint.

I set them up for airbrushing with some transparent createx airbrush paint, red and yellow.

Round 1

Yellow round 1

Unfortunately though I think they look pretty spot on, the transparency is not transparent enough to see through them. Might be good for display, but for costuming I’d need another method.

 

[The Sweatshop]

Time to prep for actual prosthetic cast. I put the spare glasses with clay to assisted the release of the prosthetic without locking the glasses and requiring too much cutting out.

Also I got my actor some appropriate teeth. Brand is Dental Distortions model Gaul.

Unfortunately this was when my karma caught up to me. I tried to pull this cast with my teachers help. Mixed the appropriate color in the separate parts and mixed A and B and mixed thoroughly. Poured and started to spread to all edges. About halfway through the pot life of the silicone, my teacher and I looked at each other, NO MOLD RELEASE! We immediately started scraping out the silicone like trying to remove icing from a cake. Unfortunately many bits of the silicone had set up and was permanently fused to the mold. Tears were shed and I decided to just go ahead and try to pull some prosthetics from the damaged mold. It will just to be an older more battle damaged Cad Bane.

Not too bad right*bawling*

Even though I thought the eyes were pretty good, they obviously have far too much yellow and overruns the red.

 

[The Sweatshop]

Todays the big day! This is application day and here is my actor all ready to become Cad!

I first applied the Bald cap with Pros-Aide and made sure to cover his ears and install the glasses before installing the prosthetic also with Pros-Aide. I did wish I knew about Skin Tite to adhere the prosthetic and use it to blend the edges better. I found out about it with my Burnt Anakin project and it helped tremendously.

After airbrushing some blue. You can definitely tell that without the skin tite, the chin does not want to adhere very well.

Peep the teeth!

Bet you didn't know Cad could dance this well!

Unfortunately our classmate had to miss application day to undergo a surgery, so we sent her a video hoping to cheer her up.

I do have one more update for this project, I was able to use my prosthetic for a silent film project so once they are done editing and give me a copy, with their permission, I'll post it here.

 

[The Sweatshop]

AlphaCloneFett here, I added the missing videos