Making Puppet Hands in Liquid Latex
Health and Safety - Latex can very commonly cause allergic reactions - it is important to test before you being using large amounts. If does get in eyes, simply wash out with water or at the nearest eye cleaning kit and seek medical advise.. Its also very difficult to get out of clothes so overalls or long sleeves should be worn.
- Plaster mould
- Liquid latex
- Old brush or sponges
- Armature
- Tape
The hand was done with a very similar process as the body. I started by doing a few layers of the pink latex in the mould using a small brush to make sure all the surface was well coated. I then laid the hand armature onto one side of the mould. After this, I closed up the two piece of the mould and taped them together to stop the latex from dripping out. Then, I poured some more latex into the pour hole making sure to tap the mould to pop any air bubbles. The images below show the results.
This took a long while to dry and still hadn't completely set when I removed it from the mould. As the plaster mould stays very cold, I thought the latex in the centre would dry better outside of the mould. After all the latex had completely cured, I used a little pair of scissors to cut away the excess. Finally I dipped them into more of latex just to give the surface a more unison finish. I actually quite like how the hands came out and will definitely be using this technique again in the future. It would work better if the hands were bigger as I could be able to sculpt more detail in. To save time, I sculpted a hand that could be reversed and look the same on the front as the back. This means that I can use the same mould to make both right and left hands.
