2 weeks ago, a Halloween City opened up near me. I never have any luck finding anything for my yard haunt at these types of stores, but I decided to go in just to get some haunt spirit motivation.
They had just opened and were still in the process of filling their shelves, but out of the corner of my eye, I caught a small Grave Breaker prop. And it actually looked kinda cool.
My mind raced with ideas on how to make it much creepier and I decided to bring it home and immediately got to work...
In looking at the prop, I realized that it was a bit flimsy out of the box, so my first step was to beef it up a bit.
I removed the hair and sculpted part of a foam ball that I had laying around to form out a full head. I used a few toothpicks and some Gorilla Glue to join the piece to the back of the head. For some reason, this prop had a flat back of the head, which wouldn't work when viewed from anywhere but straight on. And I had plans for this guy to be up at the front of my display...
Once the glue dried, I went to work on "corpsing" him. On a quick note, some people like to paint the skull before adding the corpsing layers, but I don't. I keep the skull as bright as possible, so that it will stay lighter in the highlight areas once the staining is complete. I also add 3 to 4 layers of plastic "flesh" to the body to get better raised areas, especially across the face.
I use the standard .7-mil plastic drop cloth, torn off into random, jagged pieces. I wrap the pieces around the skull (or other body part to be "corpsed") and then simply shrink/melt it with a heat gun. The plastic reduces down nicely, and when layered will form a solid layer of flesh. I added extra pieces of plastic to the areas I wanted raised, like the brow, cheeks, and lips.
When using the heat gun, I will pay special attention to the face, namely the eye sockets, the nose cavity, and most importantly the mouth. I want to form those areas as realistically as possible, trying to get the prop to emote emotion. I will always try to keep the mouth open, as though it's screaming.
Once I'm satisfied with the flesh layers and the facial expression, I get to staining. I use whatever I have laying around, which happened to be a small can of dark wood stain. I start with a full, heavy coat over the entire head. I then take paper towels and carefully wipe away the raised areas that I want to highlight. I will then go back and add a little bit of stain to the areas I want to keep dark, adding as much contrast as possible. (PLEASE wear gloves while doing this!)
I went and spattered the wood stain across the prop's clothing to dirty it up a bit, too.
On this particular prop, I went in after the stain had dried, and added some black paint to the eye sockets, nose cavity and inside the mouth for even more contrast and detail.
Once everything had dried, it was ready to photograph!
Be sure to stop back next week for part 2, where I make this prop move!!
2 comments:
Well cool - I have always been interested in corpsing and now I know how it is done. You certainly improve the creep factor of that prop.
That's awesome. You did a heck of a job improving the look of that piece.
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