Cheap Skulls — Static Prop, Part 1

One bought skull becomes an unlimited supply of skulls. Foil is pressed over the original to pick up its shape, a shell of hot glue is built over the foil, and the whole thing is cut off and closed back up. There is no mould box, no release agent, no cure time and no mess, and each copy costs a few cents in glue.

This is the most thoroughly documented build in the archive, in four parts, and the technique underlies several other projects here — the candy dish, the spectres, and the shell method on face transplant.

You need at least one pre-existing skull to copy. Anything rigid works. Two are handy: one large soft foam or latex skull and one small hard plastic one behave differently and teach you the method from both ends. Discount stores sell both for a few dollars, and out of season they are cheaper still.

One note on effort. Measuring this project in hours is misleading, because the work is nearly all waiting for glue. A more honest unit is albums. One skull is roughly one run through a full-length record, and the smaller ones come in under that.

Materials

Making the shell

Step 1 — Skin the master in foil

Cover the skull with aluminium foil, working it down into the eye sockets, the nasal opening and the cheek hollows. Wrap the underside as well — the base is needed for the support ridge in step 4, and it is easy to forget it and have to redo the whole thing.

The approach that works is one large piece over the cranium and separate small pieces for the eyes and nose, since those need to be pushed in far further than a single sheet will stretch. Where two pieces meet, a small dot of hot glue tacks them so they cannot shift while you work.

The foil is doing the detail work. Whatever texture you press into it now is exactly what the finished skull will have — no more, no less.

Step 2 — Build the glue shell

Once the master is completely covered, start laying hot glue over the foil.

Do the eye sockets first. This sounds like a detail and it is not. Reaching into a socket later, over a finished cranium, means dragging the hot nozzle across work that has already set — and you will mark it. Do the awkward recesses while everything around them is still bare.

Move the nozzle in small overlapping circles rather than long straight lines. The circular motion lets the tip stir into the glue you have just laid, which fuses each new area into the last and prevents the visible seams that a line-by-line approach leaves.

You will get pits and ridges where the glue runs thicker in some places than others. Leave them. That unevenness is what gives the finished skull its bone texture, and it is what the ink wash in part 3 will find and exploit. A perfectly smooth shell paints up looking like plastic.

Step 3 — Cover the top and sides, then the base ridge

Work in small patches until the whole top and both sides are covered. Once that glue is hard to the touch, turn the skull over and do the underside.

The base does not need filling. All that is required is a strong continuous ridge of glue running around the bottom edge. That ridge is the structural member of the whole piece — it is what stops the finished shell collapsing under its own weight or when it is picked up. Filling the entire base wastes glue and adds weight for no gain.

Step 4 — Let it cool completely

Three or four minutes is usually enough. Test with a fingertip on a thick area rather than a thin one, since thin areas cool first and will fool you.

Do not rush this. Warm glue is flexible, and a shell prised off warm distorts permanently — most often across the cranium, which then never quite closes back up in part 2.

With the shell built and cool, the next job is getting it off the master. Continue to part 2 — cutting the release seam.