Re: ** New Members: Please Introduce Yourselves Here! **
Hi there everyone. I am new to this board, and I have joined since in my country (Switzerland, so don’t blame me for my English), there seems to be absolutely no one who does prop building or sculpting in any way near the quality you people do. The things I have seen here are so amazingly realistic and beautiful that I am just stunned again and again. I have mainly been drawing all my life, and a few years ago stumbled across a website called thesculptorscorner.com. The site, however, seems to be dead. At the same time, I have bought a Terminator Statue similar to the ones they had in the Planet Hollywood restaurants, from a guy called Schwerthelm Ziehfreund from Germany. I studied the statue for hours, trying to find out how it was built, and from then on was hooked. I bought the Stan Winston book and clay, silicone and whatever else was needed.
As many of you guys, I have always been a huge admirer of Arnold. I grew up watching his movies, and following his career in books and magazines has always been a great inspiration.
After having met Arnold in Geneva, Switzerland on the 8th of march last year (he hold a speech there for his R20 company) and getting finally his autograph, I have started with a silicone project (my first one…). I was amazed to see this guy once for real and to stand there in front of him and see him so near and all that. This guy has a tremendous aura, and I couldn’t hardly speak at first… So I wanted to build a bust of him the same way he was sitting there before he gave his speech (that why his head is slightly bent on the pictures). I started out with an utterly crappy recast my brother got me for my birthday years ago. The original of it once might have been a 3d scan of Arnold for T3, but the skin details were all gone, it was kind of warped and with parts crumbling away. So I built my first silicone mould and took a clay cast I started to play around with. I resculpted it where I saw the need for it, and I really started to love sculpting. At the moment I try to learn as much about skin detailing as possible, using everything from a dog brush to my little boy’s toothbrush, toothpicks and so on… Anyway, as you can see from my pictures, I have not yet finished Arnold’s face which I want to look a bit more aged than in T3, more the way he looks in “The last stand”. I need to refine the eyes area with all the wrinkles and maybe even have to put on a bit clay in order to make his face look a bit more hanging. After the clay bust will be finished, I want to build an ultracal mold and then cast the whole thing in silicone.
I have done a vast research already about how to put glass eyes into the silicone in the end and about how to fix them... I seem to be utterly clumsy since I haven’t found anything of much help yet... I have seen some screws in some fiberglass molds where the eyes will go, and I imagine that they hold some kind of replacement bulbs until the silicon skin has cured in order for the real eyes to be put in their exact place. How the eyes will hold in the end (through the resin core?) is yet another mystery to me… I work a lot with the Stan Winston book and the Todd Debreceni book, but I am clueless at the very moment regarding this issue. I would highly appreciate if you guys could help a poor noob a little, maybe there is a thread I have not yet read or a book I should buy?
Florian
