Re: Matt's Spider-Man: Homecoming Suit build!
Alright so if you've been following me on instagram and checking out my stories, you'll know that I've started working on the back spider. I created a mold with about seven layers of vellum board and glued those together to get the shape and extrusion that I wanted. I then spray painted that with thick coats of black to smooth out any marks of glue and small imperfections. It's actually my first time playing around with liquid latex, so I was quite excited. In my first attempt, I mixed some red acrylic paint with the liquid latex to get that nice red tint when the latex dries. I left it to dry for about 10 hours. After demolding it, well.... it didn't turn out so good.
The legs got stretched too far out and there were pores everywhere even though I used a squeeze bottle to apply the liquid latex. It looked terrible. But then again, it was my first time with latex. I researched on what I could have done wrong. First of all, the piece got so overstretched because it wasn't dry enough. Second, the pores on the cast piece were due to the acrylic paint and the liquid latex not being mixed well enough. And finally, I learned that one must apply a netted fabric or something similar to avoid it overstretching.
So I cleaned up the mold, refined it to get the engraved lines on the spider a bit deeper and I poured in just the liquid latex without any mix of acrylic paint.
Then I left it to dry overnight before I applied the netted fabric and added another coat of latex. So to avoid my previous mistake, I resisted all urge to touch or remove the latex from the mold. I left that to dry for a whole day before I demolded it today (the morning after I added the fabric). I spread powder all over it to avoid the latex sticking to itself, powdered up my hands as well and pulled out the cast from the mold. And voila!
I love how it turned out! It was well worth the wait and you do learn from your mistakes.
Trimmed.
Here's a before and after pic.
Love how this is coming together. Stay tuned for more updates!