Monster hands (or how i learned to relax and love latex)

I though I'd post some progress photos for once. I have to apologize the low quality of these pictures. I happen to work in a very small and very poorly lit apartment, mostly at night in a hurry and suffering from constant sleep deprivation. Well at least with this particular project. So try not to mind the mess and blur and what not.

Here's a life span of a pair of monster hands or gloves that I made for a short movie. These gave me a lot of headache and I'm not really sure if I'm happy with them. I totally ran out of time with these mostly because I was so occupied with the monsters mask at the same time. And ofcourse the mask was the absolute priority number one on my to-do list so when I finally got to the gloves it was two days before we were going to shoot. And I had to make two pairs of gloves.

I built the model with modeling paste on top of a large leather glove. I took some reference from a monster glove I'd done earlier.

Took a mold with silicone building it up layer by layer. Silicone thickener would've been a great help here.

Yeah. Looks delicious. 

I only cast the top of each hand because I didn't have time to make two part molds. At this point I was also slowly running out of silicone so I was about to panic. I made mother molds out of plaster and poured in the pigmented fx silicone. 

 

 I took the silicone cover of the molds and mounted them on a pair of gloves. Unfortunately the silicone had not entirely cured for some reason. Now was the time to really panic. I cleaned these up with alcohol and soap but they still kept on pushing silicone oil to the surfice. I think I might have measured the stuff wrong somehow. I was really really tired.

These really felt disgusting but since they were firm enough I had no choice but to powder them and ignore sticky surfice. After all they weren't exactly making a mess or anything, they just felt diffenrent than usual.

With the second pair I had to change to stockings and latex. That worked a lot better. I hand sewed the stocking coverings to the gloves and put a few layers of latex and paint on them.

Then I used the mold to cast some texture.

I also cast some nails out of polyurethane plastic. 

I cut holes for the nails and pushed them through. Glued them to place with contact glue and finished the edge with latex. 

Here's the final product, with textures put on and blended with latex and paint. Not really realistic, but close enough for our purposes. Next time I'm doing something like this I'll start much earlier and use time on the detail.