Skyrim Dragon Priest Mask: Part Two

Hello again, internet person!  I've been debating what to do about this post for a couple weeks now.  If you remember Part One, this started out as a challenging project.  Part Two just got worse and worse, so I'll focus on what I did wrong and what I should have done so that I'll have some good notes to use should I attempt something like this (again) in the future.

First, I'll share my results so you know what I mean when I say this turned out pretty bad.

Final Results

Glamour shot, if you will

So this is a pretty good picture simply because you can see most of the flaws right up front.  Weird splotches and holes in the layers of resin, blobs around the eyes and mouth that weren't supposed to be there, a nice big dent in the forehead section, and some warping around the bottom.  I know what caused everything except that dent-- seriously, the heck happened there?-- and will outline which step caused what below.

Step Two: Molding

Creating a glove mold for this mask seemed like an easy enough thing to do, but many of the surface flaws came from me not knowing what I was doing.  I used Smooth-On's Dragon Skin rubber, brushing on a few layers over the course of a couple days.  This was a good choice of materials, but I skipped a very crucial step-- adding a thickening agent to the last couple layers to beef it up.  This is especially important to do on something like this mask, which has some really pointy high-points and corners.  My mold ended up ripping around the eyes, mouth, and nose areas when I went to demold, which caused those weird surface anomalies.  It also made a huge mess in my mother mold.

Of course, the mother mold had its own problems outside of some spills.  I tried to go the cheap route and use plaster bandages for this hard outer shell.  Pro tip-- don't try to use plaster bandages.  They were not nearly sturdy enough for this job and my mother mold ended up too floppy and soft in places that needed to be rock-hard, like the entire jaw.  That might actually be where the dent in the forehead came from, now that I think about it.  As a bonus, the powder from the bandages goes everywhere and there seems to be nothing you can do to stop this.  I will most likely look for another Smooth-On product next time I make a mother mold, as I think they have a paste meant for this purpose.

The other problem I had was that the rubber kept flopping around inside the mother mold any time I tried to rotate the whole thing, which is definitely not ideal considering the mother is meant to hold everything in place.  I ended up fixing this by taping everything to a piece of cardboard, but it wasn't elegant in the slightest.  I believe the proper method is to bolt everything to a piece of plywood when you have an open-face mold like this, but I'm still looking into it.  It might just be a matter of making things properly from the start.

Step Three: Casting

The casting process had its own challenges, the main one being that I was very timid with the slushing part because I knew there was a good chance my mold would leak or spill since it was so poorly-built.  You can see this in the picture as the spots that ended up grey instead of red-- that's where a layer didn't quite cover the entire surface of the mold.  Getting the jaw and chin area covered was especially difficult, since it was prime "spill it all over myself if I do it wrong" area.  They ended up very flimsy as a result.

Because of this lack of coverage, I ended up doing too many layers of the red resin.  This was a clear-cast resin I had tinted with the intent of leaving a glass-like layer on top of the dark grey base.  In some spots this kind of worked, but overall the effect didn't come through like I had intended.  I think if I try this again, I'll paint the first layer onto the mold instead of casting it so I can control it a little better.  I'm not sure if XTC-3D would work for this purpose, but it might be worth trying.

Step Four: Sanding and Weathering

This step worked out about like I planned, so I'll just touch on it briefly.  After the cast had finished hardening, I wet-sanded it starting at 400 grit all the way up to 1500 grit or so.  This wouldn't have been necessary if my original had been nice and smooth, mind you.  I'll give it another sanding session before I attempt another mold so I can skip this post-processing on the pulls.

Once it dried, I mixed some black acrylic paint with water and just slopped it into the seams and scratches of the mask and wiped up with excess with a paper towel.  I could have done a better job of this, but I think it turned out kinda nice considering how much of a mess the rest of the mask was.

More Pictures

Here's the rest of the pictures I took before sending this mask off as a Christmas present.  I've also compiled them into an Imgur album if that's less painful to view.  Hopefully this summary of my comedy of errors saves someone from making the same mistakes!

Before post-processing

Front view

The other side

Close-up of the bad layering

I taped up the back in the hopes of
reinforcing it, since the edges were very frail

Skyrim Dragon Priest Mask: Part One

Hello!  I've decided to go ahead and share another project I've been working on, since I'm getting bored from the constant set-backs of my Ocarina of Time coasters.  As the title suggests, this one is a Dragon Priest mask from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.  I'm using a model I found on Thingiverse for this project rather than trying to model it myself.  I'm still new to modeling for 3D printing, so this saved me a ton of time and frustration.

Part One: Printing

The biggest challenge to printing this mask was the size.  This thing was way too big for my measly 100 x 100 x 130 mm print bed, so I ended up cutting it into fifteen different pieces, which I then had to struggle to glue together.  NetFabb is a nice tool for this sort of work, as even the free version will cut a model and repair the resulting holes for you.

Here you can see my cuts in NetFabb Basic

Once I got all the pieces down to a good size, I started printing them.  Obviously this took some time, and each piece had to be oriented just right to both stand up to printing and get a nice-looking print surface.  I also started encountering an extrusion issue with this print-- parts that needed a lot of retraction ended up with lots of little clogs that eventually started ruining my prints, as several layers would go by with my printer blissfully unaware that it wasn't actually extruding plastic.  I still haven't found a good solution to this, but I managed to work around it for now.

Trying to glue all these pieces together was a pain in the butt.  Since I had never tried cutting up a large print like this before, I didn't know that I'd end up with such thin pieces that simply did not provide enough surface area for super glue to bind to.  And since I couldn't fit them together all nice and neat, I ended up with a few uneven spots where the corners met and a number of gaps between seams.  It was an all-around mess, really, but it eventually pulled together.  I tried smoothing it out as best I could with my Dremel and a layer of XTC-3D, then used some cheap putty to fill in whatever I missed.

So far so good, eh?

It's still not quite ready for molding, as I've learned through my other projects.  I'll be going over it with several grits of sandpaper until its a smooth, uniform surface with no noticeable imperfections.  At that point, I'll look into how to get a mold going.  Until then, may the super glue be with you, not on you!


UPDATE 7 November:  Turns out "water putty" was a bad choice, as it kinda dissolves in water and doesn't really stick to a smooth plastic surface.  Go figure.  Instead of continuing this ill-fated attempt to be eco-friendly, I'm buying myself a tube of Bondo, which seems to be the go-to of this maker community, and will refill the gaps I uncovered.  Live and learn, I suppose!