Here’s a story about a prop master who has found a new career killing zombies. I think most props people imagine they would be pretty well equipped to fight zombies.
Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame) has quite an intense and detailed tutorial on making a silicone rubber mold with a plaster mother mold (or as he calls it, a “hard shell mold”). It is perhaps a bit more involved than most theatrical prop shops would ever need, but a lot of the extra steps he does are to keep the mold from collapsing on itself and to ensure the two halves are lined up perfectly.
What do you want to know about drill bits? How about everything! Ok, so this free PDF guide to drill bits deals only with woodworking (no metal or plastics), but it is still a useful amount of information available at a glance.
So, I’ve talked about the invention of the jig saw before; its history is at least somewhat intertwined with the history of fret and scroll saws. Well, Chris Schwartz has a piece on the history of the coping saw, another tool sharing this history. I personally love my coping saw, and consider it one of the indispensable tools in my prop-making bag.
Life casting a hand is one of the easier parts to do; the only tricky part here was that they were rehearsing uptown at Second Stage Theatre and I only had an hour, so I had to prep everything beforehand so I could be in and out like a ninja hand caster before anyone knew what had happened.
Jay O. Sanders molding his hand
I used alginate because it’s cheap, non-toxic, safe on the skin, and sets up quickly. It’s made from seaweed and used in dentistry to make molds of your teeth and gums. After mixing the powdered alginate with water and filling a hand-sized container, I asked Jay to pose his hand and submerge it. It doesn’t heat up like plaster; it just slowly thickens. In about ten minutes, it had solidified enough to where Jay could remove his hand. It’s stretchy enough that he could pull his hand out without breaking or tearing the mold (if done slowly), and it doesn’t really stick to anything (no mold release is needed). The little bit that does stick can be washed off with water.
Pouring plaster in the alginate mold
The thing with alginate is that it starts shrinking right away as it loses water. You only have about two or three hours to make a cast before it has shrunk noticeably. I mixed up some plaster while still at Second Stage and poured it in. After it had hardened enough, I packed up my stuff and took the subway back down to the Public Theater.
Plaster hand inside the alginate mold
Now I could just tear the alginate away until the plaster hand was free.
Brush-on mold
I decided to do a brush-on mold for this because of the shape of the hand. I had only attempted a brush-on mold once before and it didn’t go so well. This time around was only marginally better. I ended up making it work, but that’s about the only good thing I could say. After the rubber mold set, I built a two-piece plaster shell around it for support. I ended up having to cut open some of the silicone mold to remove the plaster hand inside.
Unpainted silicone rubber hand
I cast the hand itself out of Smooth-On Dragon Skin, which long-time readers may remember being used in both the deadbody and head for The Bacchae, as well as the deadlamb for Little Foxes. Dragon Skin itself cures fairly translucent and colorless, so I tinted the whole mix with a flesh color. I also embedded some dowels inside to cut down on the amount of silicone rubber I would need and to act as bones.
Hand of Titus Andronicus
I “painted” more Dragon Skin over top, tinted with different colors. I rubbed some darker colors into the cracks and crevices to give it a bit of depth, and added a bluish tint onto the veins. I was using a fairly thick mix so it wouldn’t run. Silicone rubber is self-leveling unless it is thickened, and it can be pretty glossy if allowed to do that. I didn’t want that on the hand, but I took advantage of that for the fingernails, where I used a pretty thin mix and only a touch of color to get a shiny and translucent effect.
"I kind of feel like that kid who found the severed hand..."
The hand has gone through some changes since I took these pictures; the bones on the back were cut down in length, and a lot more blood was painted on. All told, it only took about three days between them asking me to lend a hand making a cast of a hand to the cast having a hand in hand for rehearsal.
In Thurston James’ second book, he tackles the subject of molding and casting for prop makers in more detail. The Prop Builder’s Molding & Casting Handbook guides you through the most common materials and methods used in many prop shops. Because of its specific focus (and better organization), this book is far more successful than his previous Theatre Props Handbook, which, as I mentioned in my review, meandered through disparate topics with no way to quickly find information.
Though written in 1989, the methods described in this book still hold true today. Though the range of materials we can use today have grown dramatically, they remain improvements and new formulations to older materials whose predecessors can be found in this book.
It remains one of the most widely recommended books for molding and casting props because of the unique niche it fills. It describes the most common materials and methods used in props shops and by hobbyists; these materials are used because of their cost, ease of use, availability, and proven results. Books on molding and casting for manufacturing and industry are more focused on specific or specialized materials, and they aim for a level of consistency and cost efficiency which the prop artisan would never possibly need. Shaving a tenth of a cent off the cost of a casting makes a difference if you are casting ten thousand pieces, but it will be impossible to notice if you are only making ten.
James seems to have had an epiphany in shop safety between this book and the last, as he now presents clear and accurate safety precautions in the beginning of the book, and continues to reiterate them throughout. In his Theatre Props Handbook, safety precautions were nearly nonexistent.
The book does a good job of covering the generalities of mold making and casting. It discusses the model and its preparation, and defines a number of necessary terms, such as undercuts, release agents, mother molds and the like. It describes the considerations of making a mold of your specific piece, and breaks the various molding materials and casting agents into categories. In a way, it describes the process of choosing your materials in an almost flowchart-like manner. If you know what your model looks like, and you know what kind of properties and appearance your castings need, then you can narrow your choices of mold material and casting material down to a few choices. In the book, he describes over thirty of these material choices.
One of the trick props we needed for The Book of Grace was a phone which John Doman smashed during every performance. We decided that the phone receiver would remain real, but the part it hung on would be cast from plaster. It would all hang on a wooden base, and a collection of “phone innards” will be held inside the plaster part, so when it broke, an assortment of metal bells, chip-boards, and other electronic components would be left hanging on the wall.
Carefully weigh out the silicone
We made a two-part silicone mold of the phone. Making a two-part silicone mold is beyond the scope of today’s post. However, I did get a photograph before the pouring of the first part. At this point, Natalie Taylor Hart took over the project.
Preparation for making a mold of the phone
Normally, the next step is to make the second half of the mold from the back of the phone. In this case, the shape of the back was far more complicated than what we needed, and we were worried the plaster cast would be too thin. So we took the first part of the mold and built up the thickness we wanted to achieve out of Klean Klay. The Klean Klay is the yellow substance in the photograph above, and remains flexible like plastiline. It also does not contain sulphur, which reacts with the silicone mold-making compound. The mold still needed some tweaking, so Natalie carved directly on the silicone to perfect it.
A view of the mold
We wanted the color of the phone receiver to match the back part, which was the sort of taupe that most appliances from the late twentieth century came in. When the plaster phone gets smashed, the broken edges would show up white. Thus, we needed to dye the plaster while it was still in liquid form. Natalie found that a tablespoon of Rit tan dye in the mix made the best color match.
Adding dye to the plaster mix
Natalie sifted the plaster into the water until tiny islands of plaster began to form on the surface. Once she had made a few phones, she had the exact measurements of both plaster and water marked down.
Combining the plaster into the water
Next, she let the plaster sit in the water for about 30 seconds. “Wetting” the plaster allows it to mix more thoroughly.
Letting the plaster wet up
With such a small amount, she mixed it by hand. This also gave her a tactile way to ensure all the lumps were worked out of the mix.
Mixing the plaster
Natalie discovered the best way to pour this particular mold was to slosh plaster over the top half before putting it together. It was important to get plaster in all the cracks and crevices or the strength would be compromised.
Pouring the plaster into the mold
The phones set up overnight, but they actually took two to three days to fully dry. We could not get any kind of adhesive to keep the plaster parts onto the bases until all the moisture was completely out. We ended up needing around 40-50 phones for the run of the show, but since we could cast more than one a day, we could make them throughout the run rather than all at once.
Phones
Finally, here’s a video showing the end result. This was taken earlier with a different phone model, before they changed it to the slimmer model.
In part one of “making a body for Bacchae“, we developed a series of samples and prototypes of dead body parts out of spray foam, Foam Coat, and Dragon Skin. Since then, we’ve been able to show the pieces to the whole production team; John Conklin, the scenic designer, and JoAnne Akalaitis, the director, gave us the go-ahead to continue on with the actual body pieces.
We started with a skeleton. We were originally going to get a skeleton from a medical supply store, but I found a corpsing tutorial at “Skull and Bones.com” which shows that you can get a “4th quality” skeleton from certain companies for a lot cheaper. It may be missing some hardware and fasteners, and the overall quality will be less, but all the pieces are there, and for our purposes, it was perfect.
The full skeleton laid out on a table
We broke the skeleton apart into several pieces. In the play, King Pentheus is killed through sparagmos, and we had to make the end result. The legs and skull were three separate pieces. We left one shoulder blade and upper arm on the torso, which left us with one complete arm, and one forearm.
The first steps in adding muscle to the bones
Like the sample pieces, we built the muscle up by spraying expanding foam onto the bones, carving it into muscles, and coating everything with Rosco Foam Coat.
guides you through the most common materials and methods used in many prop shops. Because of its specific focus (and better organization), this book is far more successful than his previous 
, which, as I mentioned in 
