Greetings! Have to go quick today, so here’s a quick look at three new props out of the Goodspeed workshop of horrors. I’ll follow that with some quick shots of stuff I’ve found for the haunted house. 

I just discovered the brilliant voice of Michael Kiwanuka a few weeks back, and ever since I did, his songs have seen regular rotation on the Goodspeed family playlist. I’m in no way a musical person, in that I can neither play an instrument nor carry a tune, but I’ve always been a great appreciator of those who can. Kiwanuka’s singing reminds me of one of my absolute favourites, the incomparable Otis Redding, so naturally I’ve fast become a fan. I don’t know, there’s this ease in his voice that to me, somehow, seems… reassuring.

Now, you know me. I don’t think it likely that an almighty exists. Nor do I, in most cases at least, see the benefit in people believing that one does. The various ways in which religion and faith continue to harm the human endeavour have been well documented. And yet I couldn’t think of a more direct path away from Michelle’s troubles than surrendering herself to Jesus. Or Allah. Or whomever.

An ultra quick tutorial today for an ultra quick prop. In trying to assemble more items for the spooky shrine I’m building into this year’s haunt, the priority has been to build unique, but not incredibly time consuming pieces. Meet Olivia, (again, named by my kids) a spooky bust that took just a few hours to build.

I was lucky enough to find this piece at Goodwill for 3 dollars. I think it’s intended to be used by little girls who want to learn how to tie braids. How sweet. Now to make something demented out of it instead!

First thing’s first. I had to remove those eyelashes. Nothing scary about lovely long lashes. My exacto blade did the trick.

I wanted this wound in the piece, and rather than build up around it like you would on a makeup appliance, I just hacked through the soft rubber of the dolls head. (her shoulders were harder plastic, which became important later)

I also had to lose her smile, so I cut off the lower lip. In both cases my intention was to plug the hole from within the doll’s head using Apoxie Sculpt.

Time to mix the Apoxie. More on it’s use in my last tutorial.

Before putting it in I decided to soften/bevel the wound by carving the edges a tad with the exacto blade.

I removed the head from the shoulders to insert the material. Stupidly, I had never thought to check whether or not my hand could fit inside the doll’s head. It could not. So I had to split the neck at the back a bit to make room. No matter, I’ll be hot-gluing it anyway.

I tucked the sculpt up behind the holes.

In the case of the mouth I had to smooth out on the exterior side to blend with the rest of the face.

Now, this was one of those dolls that close their eyes when turned horizontal, so I decided to immobilize that feature by building around the eyes with Apoxie.

Top and bottom were covered, then smoothed. This also hides the gap around the eye nicely.

Hot glue was then added all around the neck.

I also sealed the gap with a bead of hot glue. I’m not at all concerned with this part being pretty, as it will live behind the hair.

Finally, more sculpt was used to hide the seam between rubber face and plastic shoulders. This is why I keep using Apoxie Sculpt: it bonds to everything.

Again, it can smoothed by using a little water. You can sand it after curing, although I didn’t bother on this job.

Next I used my blade to carve fine little cracks in the skin, all over the face and shoulders. This step matters later when we antique the sculpture. 

Take your time and do a bunch of these.

It was harder to carve into the plastic shoulders, so I etched some scratches using a sculpting tool.

Then I taped off the eyes and allowed the Apoxie to cure.

Once again, I used spray paint for plastic applications. I probably should have used my new can of Krylon Fusion for plastics, but I wanted to use this cheap stuff up.

Now, this produced some strange results. After drying overnight, I noticed that the paint on the shoulders dried perfectly, but the paint on the rubber face was still very tacky. Since this paint is basically a layer of rubber, if my finger stuck in the wrong spot I’d end up tearing a strip of it clean off.

As a solution I sprayed on a coat of Krylon Matte Finish. It solved the problem perfectly! Now both surfaces would take paint identically. No more tackiness at all.

I couldn’t keep this gal blonde, so I used some Eco-Flo Gel Antique (Saddle Tan colour) from Tandy Leather Factory. (which I use all the time, but discovered thanks to Allen Hopps)

Use gloves. It stains skin like crazy.

This took a bit, but I worked it into the hair as best I could. I knew I’d never eliminate the blonde completely, but I did change the colour dramatically. Later on I actually dusted the hair with a little sandy coloured spray paint as well.

Now to make the hair messy and scary. I probably should have given her a rough haircut first, but instead I just went right to the latex.

Since I was going to be dipping my brush in and out of the latex and hair, I removed some and put it onto a tray. You don’t want the brush depositing fine little hairs into your good bucket of latex.

Then I used a disposable brush to start working it into the hair.

The whole idea is to build body and texture.

Here’s a wee video on how it was done.

31.MP4 Watch on Posterous

And that’s what it came out like.

I mixed a colour primarily of bleached titanium, but with a touch of the Sienna.

And then started sponging it on. Earlier I removed the tape from the eyeballs for some reason… not sure why. So I had to do it again.

I then moved to straight Sienna for an accent colour. No paint job is complete with only 1 or 2 colours, so experiment a bit.

I wasn’t worried about filling in my scratches with the paint, because I knew the next step would make them show.

More Gel Antique! Surprise! Once again, brush it on, wipe it off. It clings into all the low places (including the cracks I spent so much time on) and leaves an antiqued look to the rest of the paint job. (colour #3)

I then brushed some very dark brown (almost black) around the eyes and mouth… just because it looks messed up.

And finally I dry brushed a little green here and there. (colour #4)

So there she is. Quick, easy, done!

Oh wait. I dosed the whole thing with a coat of Crystal Clear to give it gloss and protect the paint job. And I used a tiny bit of Gel Antique around the rims of the white eyeballs to give them a bloody look.

There’s Olivia! To see more Halloween/tutorial stuff, see the nifty new tab on the top-left of the site. Enjoy!

All images below can be embiggened. Just click on them! The bright sun I shot her in makes the black around the eyes seem minimal, but it shows up better than that.

How to make a creepy looking statue for your haunted house.

Hi folks! Apologies ahead of time to the science-leaning fans of the blog, because I know it’s been awhile since I’ve put out that sort of content, but I have another Halloween prop tutorial to share! Huzzah!

I’ll keep the words brief. This is a prop inspired by a piece by master prop-maker Brian Demski. I don’t have rights to the image but you can see it on display (lower right side) here.

My plan wasn’t to replicate that prop, but to just do something kind of similar. I also didn’t want to get into the business of sculpture and resin casting, because I only need one of these suckers. So back to the world of doll-butchery did I go!

The Tutorial

Here were the victims. I wanted to do a nude, so I needed an entire body. Unfortunately most porcelain dolls (right) have no skin under the clothes, and most rubber dolls (left) look far too babyish for the prop I wanted to build, so a combination of the two was necessary.

After some simple surgery…

…I took the limbs from the porcelain doll.

This is all that was left of her. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a pretty scary prop right there.

Then I had to remove the limbs from the rubber doll.

Along came mister glue gun.

I just filled up the joints with hot glue and then fit the porcelain limbs inside. Easy. 

This needs to take the weight, but I will be using Apoxie Sculpt on top for smoothness and strength.

The head of the rubber doll had to go too, obviously.

Once again, some Apoxie Sculpt was used to close up the seams between parts AND to immobilze the moveable joints on the rubber doll. Can’t have them, as this is supposed to look like a statue.

A quick primer on Apoxie, since I’ve mentioned it in almost every tutorial. (No, I’m not getting paid by them… just love the stuff)

First, wear gloves while mixing.

Use equal amounts of part A and part B.

Squeeze them together, flatten into a disc, and fold over as many times as you can. Then flatten into a disc again, and repeat. Do that for 2 minutes and you should have a uniform colour, at which point you’re ready to work with it. (and you no longer need the gloves)

Apply the sculpt (I’ve incorrectly called it “clay” in the past) around the seams.

Then wet your fingers and smooth it out, while also feathering the edges down to meet with the surface of the doll.

My plan is to change the physique of this character a bit, so I don’t mind that the shoulders are now beefier. More on that in a bit.

Keep filling in seams.

I don’t want this thing to be comical so I’m filling in dollie’s butcrack. Wait… maybe there was a better way to phrase that… hmm, nah.

Now I let the Apoxie cure (2-3 hours) before adding the musculature.

I wanted this doll to be sort of androgynous, so I added pecs and bigger shoulders using more Apoxie. This sort of subtle detail is not as easy with Apoxie Sculpt, (a lot of water and smoothing was done here) which is why later I move on to another material.

I wanted Betty to stand on her own so I started beefing up and flattening the bottoms of the feet. This took some friggin’ to get right, but it was worth it.

Then I allowed this Apoxie to cure. After that, a sanding was done to smooth it all out. Apoxie isn’t clay, as I mentioned, because once cured it becomes a very strong kind of plastic. You can then sand it, drill it, whatever. Great stuff.

So I knew I had to make my head from scratch, so I used a different product from Aves called Apoxie Clay. This stuff doesn’t cure quite as hard, but it’s more clay-like in the working stage, making modelling a WHOLE lot easier.

I actually had a real coyote skull to base my sculpt on (I know, I’m weird) but you can just do a Google image search for some different angles.

I wanted it to be about half the size of the original, so I started building an armature out of aluminum foil and masking tape.

Just roll up different sized pieces of foil to mimic the features of the skull, and tape them on. Foil is an amazing sculpting medium. Try it out.

Keep comparing to the original.

Then I needed to feed a wire inside the head to attach to the doll.

Once pushed almost all the way up to the nose, I wrapped it around the head and then threaded it underneath itself for strength.

Then I mixed up the Apoxie Clay (same method as with the Sculpt) and began pressing discs of the soft medium all over the armature.

Whoops, forgot to add those eye-bones, so I did so now. (Told you there was no science in this post. “Eye bones”?)

Back to adding the clay skin.

After it was skinned I added more Apoxie to build up details and shape it, followed by smoothing. Again, this is way easier with Apoxie Clay as opposed to Apoxie Sculpt. (both of which you can get at the art store)

Another great thing about the wire I added is that I could hang it while it cured.

Once cured, it was time to attach.

Once aroung the neck and the rest went into the doll.

I then covered over all this with a good, thick neck made out of Apoxie Sculpt. (Because strength was more important here)

Time for paint! I first primed it with a paint made for plastics, since I didn’t want it flaking off the doll’s rubber belly.

This gives you an even surface to paint on, as well as the dark base I want to show through the marble effect I’m sponging on top of it. 

So then I mixed up some unbleached titanium acrylic art paint with some other tints… maybe some bleached titanium as well.

I did some sponging and some stipling with a brush. I took care to stiple away any brush strokes I left behind because they don’t look like stone at all.

Then vary the colour. I added some flesh tone to give the stone an oddly ‘human’ look. I think I added some raw sienna as well.

Keep sponging on layers of colour. Use an actual sea-sponge, once again available at the art store.

I then hand-painted on some veins in the stone, using a more severe colour. This always looks unnatural up close, but works when you look at the piece as a whole. Marble has these veins… just look at some.

The initial paint job is done. Way too clean, right?

Before dirtying it up, I sprayed on, and allowed to dry, a coat of Krylon Crystal Clear, which acts as a protectant and glossing coat. I figured stone is hard, so the dirt would be on the outside of that, so put the glossy coat on first.

Once dried, time for the Eco-Flo Gel Antique (Saddle Tan colour) from Tandy Leather Factory.

Just brush on…

…and wipe off. It leaves the dark colour in the recesses and a nice stained quality to all the rest. After this dried I hit it again with some more Crystal Clear to seal it all in.

Now time for the wings. I had this angel from a garage sale (ignore the grime on her… was experimentin’) which had these wings attached. The wings are just those soft, downy type feathers glued on to a wire-mesh armature, but they’ll do fine for the inner part of my wings.

Then I needed my glue gun, and some craft feathers. I just got these from the dollar store. Pictured are some brown feathers, but I used all black for this project.

I just peeled back the downy feathers from the armature…

…then layed a bead along the black feather’s stalk, and pressed it into the wire. This was repeated, making sure to use the longest feathers at the top of the wing, and the shortest near the bottom.

I then ‘welded’ them all together using a pool of hot glue, which will provide more strength than the initial bead of glue underneath each stalk. This also allows me to push the white downy feathers back down to cover my handiwork.

So you’re asking: “But your long feathers are black, and the inner part is white… are you daft Goodspeed?”

Well, I can’t say I wouldn’t have preferred they be all black, but since I couldn’t find any black-winged angels, it was a problem that had to be solved. And as Plato once said “As with all things, the answer is spray paint.”

Some gray primer paint was used to gradient the white into the black. This picture makes it look horrible, but it turned out better, I assure you. Spray the gray almost to the tips of the wings, but go lighter as you do, creating a fade of colour. (Don’t look down… my garage is a mess from the last Ultracal mold I made. It fell off the table during curing… Aaaahhh!!!)

Remember when I said Apoxie could be drilled in to? Well, here’s where that came in handy. The wing armature had a little wire loop so I put a little screw in for hanging them on the sculpture.

After looking at the piece, I decided she needed teeth. I found these resin replica wolf claws at Tandy Leather.

And these cheapo thingies at the dollar store.

I picked out the white ones and snapped them off at different lengths.

Then hot glued them into place. If you have a dual heat-level glue gun, use low heat here so you can control the flow of the glue a bit better. You want just enough glue on the top of the tooth that when you push it against the sculpture, you get a ‘gum’ around it. The stringy bits can be removed once cool.

I then sanded down the inner parts of the claws on very coarse paper.

And glued them on too. I then used more Gel Antique on the teeth and gums to make them match the rest of the piece. (not pictured)

I also wanted to add a weathered look, so I mixed up some Eco Flo with a bunch of water, and kept applying it in a few key places until it dripped along the statue and stained it. I kept doing this until the drips were as dark as I wanted them.

Tada! The wings are on loosely for now, just hanging on the screw, because that lets me store both more easily. Come Halloween I’ll attach them with some glue also. The following images can be embiggened, just click on them!

I’m not totally in love with the final result, but it works as set decoration for the haunted house. The head came out a bit big, the teeth a bit cheesy, and the arm position a little strange… but overall I think it’s a creepy piece to put on a shelf somewhere.

See below for a list of some other Halloween tutorials. Enjoy!

More tutorials.

Alex, the demon bust

A bronzed angel

A shrunken zombie-skull

A Gallery of Beastly Orbs

Check out these magnificent closeups of human eyes.

So here’s another little homemade prop for 2012’s Haunted House. While I realize there are a gazillion corpsing tutorials out there, this method involves building up facial muscles in clay before the latex stage, providing some increased realism and a better armature to apply the goop.

The only other thing I needed was a used doll from Value Village, ($3.99) from which I could get a semi-realistic eye.

The foam skull came with embossed teeth, but they looked pretty bad, so I decided to sculpt my own glow-in-the-dark chompers. Once again, I used the techniques outlined by Craig Schriber in his tutorial. (Same as I used on Alex, the demon-bust) Once sculpted they were baked in the oven for 20 minutes or so.

I then covered the teeth with a very thin disc of Apoxie and embedded my teeth in it. They came out awfully big, but I kind of like it that way. More Apoxie was then used to build up the musculature over the gums, locking the teeth in place. Once the sculpt was completed it looked like this.

Then it was time for traditional corpsing, laying toilet paper down on top of wet latex and brushing more latex on top, in as many layers as necessary to give you the look you want. Once it has a reall ‘rotted flesh’ look, let it dry for paint.

I used latex mask paint from Monster Makers to apply the base coat, just to be sure that it adhered to the latex.

Then I used Tandy Leather’s Eco-Flo Gel Antique (Saddle Tan colour) to add some depth to the nooks and crannies, while making it look generally dirty. This was applied to the teeth as well, and then quickly wiped off.

Then a quick dry-brush of a cream colour, followed by an even lighter dry-brush of green, both to bring out the highlights. Then it was time to attach the hair.

I had this hair on hand from another doll I had cannabilized in the past, so I used some more latex to brush it down.

Then I just repeated the painting techniques on this new ‘bald spot’, and voila! If I can find some more small skulls I’d like to make a stack of these to go on a shelf somewhere inside the haunt.

And once more in my hand for scale.

When I was a kid I used to draw all the time, and naturally everybody encouraged me to pursue it as a career. “Nah”, I’d say. “Drawing comics might be cool, but it’d probably stop being fun and just feel like work.”

John Hobby is a reader of the blog and a Facebook pal, and the other night he told me a little story about rainbows. I’d like to share it with you today.

“As a young man I was taught that rainbows were God’s promise never to flood the Earth again, and it stifled my curiosity about it. I was like “Oh okay, that’s nice of God to remind us during rain storms, nothing else to know there.”“

“But I do remember thinking that it was a contradiction, because I had seen rain storms cause flooding; especially in the desert where I grew up.”

What amazed me was not the mechanics of how penicillin inhibits bacteria, but rather that they are competitors in the first place. I had simply never heard of the decay connection between the two forms of life, nor did I realize they even interacted in any meaningful way. With no reason to suspect that they were rivals, the penicillin’s abilities remained mysterious.

Instead, all I had to do was the tiniest bit of research, and I would have understood “how” penicillin does what it does. At that point, my previous questions would have simply melted away. By looking at things from the bottom up, precisely the same direction in which nature formed them, we are reminded that cause always precedes effect.

It is here where we meet superstition’s greatest adversary. By examining any phenomenon closely, we can figure out how it works. And when we understand enough of those phenomenon, when we see the intricate way that nature interacts with itself, the need for an overarching explanation simply dissapears. There is powerfully expository knowledge out there, on almost any topic you can imagine, and when you put enough of it together, you have the equivalent of a world view.

The human brain wants to make sense of everything around it. When deprived of real information, it develops its own explanations, and superstitious beliefs are often the result. Unless we continually fill our brains with the right answers, it becomes increasingly difficult to reject the wrong ones.

The worst thing about the rainbow story John Hobby had been told as a boy, is not that it was incorrect. It’s that it claimed to be an end-point to inquiry. That there was, as John put it, “nothing else to know there”.

In contrast, the MIT lecture about rainbows does not claim to encompass all there is to know on the subject. One could follow up from there to learn what the different colours of light actually represent, or how electrons jumping from one orbit to another affect the colours we see.

In short, the answers to “how” questions are always just starting points; and hallelujah for that.