This week on Sketchy Details @Home, we play along with the comedy poltergeist challenge of SyFy's Face Off. The results on this challenge were really good overall. The judges hated the design I used for my inspiration, Laney's punk rocker electrocuted during a concert, but it was my favorite design by far. She aimed for a living Monster High doll and nailed it. My take is a cool Halloween project inspired by some random photo I saw when prepping for Halloween last year. It's a translucent, very stable packing tape ghost. I upped my game by building up the wig head base with a custom carved hairdo that meant building it as one piece and dissecting it afterwards for the final presentation. Watch then click through for the behind the scenes.
- This could have been a total disaster of a project. In fact, it almost was. I should have done a solid mohawk without undercuts so I could have kept the head as one piece and retaped one seam. The draw of the spiked mohawk was too strong.
- The easier way to have done this would have been to build a packing tape ghost form without hair, then pin the mohawk on and do that separately. I still would have had to piece the spikes back together, but I would have been attaching them to a wider, more stable base afterwards. The way I did it lost three inches of thickness on the dome of the head and that's a big deficit.
- In an ideal scenario, you only have to add extra tape from the back of the neck to the top of the head to create a nice thick seam to cut through and stabilize the design.
- Also ideally, your design doesn't buckle in on itself in removal. The solution to that is adding more layers of tape. The more tape, the less transparent the ghost becomes. A thinner ghost is stable once you reconnect it in the back but a thicker ghost will crack open like an egg shell when you cut it far enough.
- I have a ton of these heads to make in the next week. The band is all sculpted and set. The bartender is ready. Even the manager is blowing smoke up their butts. But I have no guests at the night club. That's where the ghost heads come in. A dozen or so on slapdash wire frames should look like a pretty happening club with the layout I have in mind.
- This ghost in particular is going to be a showstopper. I'm stuffing an upper body right now--chest, arms, hands, and the like--that I'm going to wrap in plastic and cover in packing tape. He's going to be that barely dressed rocker god cliche, wearing only a vest and pants. The ghost is going to be held up by two PVC pipes attached to my standard hip pieces rather than one PVC spine so you can look down the middle and see no bones. It's going to be stunning.
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