Lil Shifter Head - From Start To Finish

One of my favorite projects that I worked on in school is a small latex and polyfoam bust with punched hair.  It’s one of the few things that I took pictures of from start to finish, so I thought I would share the process.

I’m a huge nerd with a lifelong love for werewolves and the like, so I knew right away this little head was going to be a Shifter.  I started sculpting in modeling clay, and made this:

Totally boring, blech.  So I started over and sculpted this:

That’s more like it!  Much more interesting, and a lot more fun to work on.

Once the sculpt was complete, I made a plaster mold:

Then the interior of the mold was coated with about 15 layers of mask latex:

Once the latex was dry, the mold was closed and the inside of the head was filled with expanding foam.  Then the mold was taken apart, the head popped out, and the seams and imperfections in the latex skin cleaned up to get ready for painting.  For this particular head, I only did minimal cleanup on the latex, because it was the first one and meant as a test piece.

Next, the paint:

Then came the really tedious part – hair punching:

This was my first time punching hair, so I decided to do the whole head with that method to get more practice with it.  In the future I will probably glue the hair on the back of the head and just punch the front; all that punching took hours and hours.

After the hair was finally done, I added a few decorative elements…

…and voilá – finished bust:

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