citen
New Member
This costume is based off the redbird robin from the 1997 film batman & robin.
This is my first costume of this scale and I spent about a year working on the whole project. Starting from lifecasts, to initial prototypes eventually to final castings.
The lifecasting process was all done with plaster bandages over released skin. There were a few issues along the way and lots of restarts.
The initial lifecast positives were casted in ultracal/hydrocal which had many limitations, two of them being weight, and how hard it was to sand/chisel down imperfections.
Initially I was casting everything in stone. The first leg cast was a failure, the stone cast cracked and took out the stone leg lifecast along with it.
The stone torso casting process went down fine, but the stone lifecast cracked in the mold pull. I casted a positive in a mask latex which was a bad choice considering it wasn't flexible enough to be worn and I didn't want to dedicate resources to run foam latex.
Pretty much at this point I had to start over from scratch...
The next set of lifecasts were done in a rigid polyfoam, which was a step in the right direction, in terms of weight and ease of sanding and filling.
I spent a few months making molds from these positive cores in order to prevent huge losses in the future.
After the lifecast grind was over I was finally back to sculpting, originally I was using a medium chauvant clay which I felt was too slow a process so I switched to a water based clay and never looked back.
All the following pieces were hand sculpted and then molded in silicone backed with a fiberglass mothermold.
All pieces were casted in urethane, base urethane was pigmented black and the red accent color on the bird was a powedered pigment brushed into the mold.
continuing in next post since I reached the image limit...
This is my first costume of this scale and I spent about a year working on the whole project. Starting from lifecasts, to initial prototypes eventually to final castings.
The lifecasting process was all done with plaster bandages over released skin. There were a few issues along the way and lots of restarts.
The initial lifecast positives were casted in ultracal/hydrocal which had many limitations, two of them being weight, and how hard it was to sand/chisel down imperfections.
Initially I was casting everything in stone. The first leg cast was a failure, the stone cast cracked and took out the stone leg lifecast along with it.
The stone torso casting process went down fine, but the stone lifecast cracked in the mold pull. I casted a positive in a mask latex which was a bad choice considering it wasn't flexible enough to be worn and I didn't want to dedicate resources to run foam latex.
Pretty much at this point I had to start over from scratch...
The next set of lifecasts were done in a rigid polyfoam, which was a step in the right direction, in terms of weight and ease of sanding and filling.
I spent a few months making molds from these positive cores in order to prevent huge losses in the future.
After the lifecast grind was over I was finally back to sculpting, originally I was using a medium chauvant clay which I felt was too slow a process so I switched to a water based clay and never looked back.
All the following pieces were hand sculpted and then molded in silicone backed with a fiberglass mothermold.
All pieces were casted in urethane, base urethane was pigmented black and the red accent color on the bird was a powedered pigment brushed into the mold.
continuing in next post since I reached the image limit...
