Sebastian from Exhumed was getting pretty tired of the same old spark guitar gag he was doing for the Exhumed set over the last few years. For our Decayed Decades tour, Matt suggested we bring back an old gag, the guillotine. Sebastian would solo, then Dr. Philthy would come out and behead him. Exhumed had done the guillotine bit with Bud, the old guitar player, years ago, but that severed head looked REALLY bad. I offered to make something a little bit better for Sebastian.
I had very little time to get this together between tours, so it was definitely done under a crunch. And there were a few missteps on the way to making this…
It would have been amazing to do a full head mold. Even then, though, it may not have worked. That’s a lot more arduous than just sculpting from clay: having to get the model to stay still, use the alginate, and make a soft positive for remolding. In any case, the point was moot because I didn’t have Sebastian near me geographically, so I had to free sculpt his likeness.
I didn’t exactly nail it, but for theater purposes, it looked enough like him. After finishing the sculpt from WED clay, I had to move onto the molding process, my least favorite part.
I used to be sort of decent at this, but not having done it in awhile, I had to do it THREE times and fix the sculpt in-between each fuck up. The first time, I didn’t mix enough ultracal to cover the whole sculpt. The second time I stupidly reversed the ratio of ultracal to water and was left with a sloppy mess. But the third time worked.
I dwelled latex in the mold over night, then poured that out and turned the mold over and over to get it dry and even the slop out. Once the latex was dry, I used an expanding foam to give it firmness as well as hold a plastic bottle inside so the head could pour blood from its neck hole. Luckily, for some reason, Sebastian had the perfect wig which matched his own hair. It was going to be perfect for this severed head.
Doesn’t look like much in raw latex, so of course it needed to be painted. I used a layering method to make somewhat realistic skin, starting with bright pinks and reds then moving on to skin tone overlays and shadows and highlights using an airbrush and mask paint.
I cut the eyeholes out and plopped in some plastic eyeballs I got off amazon.com and we were set. I was ready to give Exhumed some head.
I was a little worried about the eyes bugging out a bit, but as you can see the mask is a perfect likeness of Sebastian.
