Shoe Casting YEHAH!

I'm still very busy building my puppets and I'm on the home stretch, so I have loads to post about in the coming days. To kick of this bombardment of posts, shoes! 

To begin with I wrapped PTFE tape around the foot joints to protect them during the sculpting and casting process. Illustrated above with Theodor's foot joint used as an example.

I then sculpted the designs of both characters shoes using Super Sculpy Firm and used UHU to lightly tack them to the surface of some foam board. As you can see, the balls that would sit inside the knee joints were not glued in place with thread lock until the shoes were cast. A piece of K&S was glued in place with Epoxy to help with the casting process.

Foam board boxes were then made around the sculpts and plaster was pored over them. For Theodor's shoes a two part mould was made to help get the boot out when the cast was filled with silicone. This was because there was a slight cone shape to the boots design. Bein' a cow boy boot and al'! YEHAH! 

After removing the original sculpt from the mould and cleaning it out, the foot joints were put back into the mould with tie downs running into the armatures. A layer of silicon was then painted into the mould so that any air bubbles that may have occurred would not be visible on the surface. Once this layer was dry the rest of the silicon was poured into the mould.

The photo's above show the shoes fresh out of the moulds. Final photos of both the hands and feet with seam lines removed will be posted altogether at a later date.

As a little treat here's a my mate Joe to sing you a song. If your in London this Saturday why not head down to 229 on Great Portland Street where him and his band Short Stories will be headlining.