Altered Evolution FX: Making A Werewolf

Making a Werewolf

Alrighty folks, first step in making our werewolf was to make the upper and lower jaw portions. We did it by drawing out a rough sketch of how big we wanted the width of each jaw to be on wax paper. Then, we built up each of those jaws on the paper with a mixture of liquid latex and cotton, making sure we built them wider at the bottom and then thinned them out slightly near the top by squaring the ends. Other features we added to these sculpts were hollowing out the inside of the mouth, as well as adding jowls to the sides and a nose on the upper jaw. If we ever had trouble with figuring out the shape, we just looked at the nearest puppy and went off of that.

Next step was to paint our jaws. We used a mixture of gray, brown, black and white for the outsides and a mixture of peach, red, and brown for the inside of the mouth. For the inside, we also tried to make rows of curved, darker lines to illustrate the roof of the mouth. We also painted the nose with pink and brown, as well as black to fill in nostrils.

Now to make the tongue! This took two tries, but unfortunately we only took pictures of out first mold. The first mold was made out of plastic wrap which was too flexible and leaky. The second was out of tin foil which was more solid so we could get a better shape out of it in which we extended the mold and made it deeper. But other than that the two molds were made virtually the same way.

How we made the mold for the tongue was by building a base out of the material in the generic shape of a tongue, and then we built walls around it. Since the mold is an inverted copy of what we wanted the tongue to be, we also built in slopes so it would look more curved, as well we added in a thin line down the middle to give it that indented tongue shape.

We made the tongue out of fx gelatin which consists of 1 part gelatin to 1 part glycerin to 1 1/2 parts water. We then added red and pink food colouring to it before putting it in the microwave for about 10 seconds at a time until it was runny and smooth looking.

When our gelatin was ready we poured in in our mold and popped in the fridge to cool.

While our tongue was in the fridge (weird sentence, we know), we laid hair on the jaws. We chose to use both brown and gray hair and just clipped it from the strands we had and mixed them as we went along. We attached the hair by covering the jaws in spirit gum and then pressing the hair on, one small section at a time.

Next step is the toothies. These were made out of toothpicks we broke a part into different sizes and then covered in cotton and liquid latex. We made them all sharp and pointy looking in standard werewolf fashion.

We glued our teeth in the jaws by using more cotton and latex and then painted over that in a lighter pinky colour than the rest of the inside of the mouth to make the gums stand out all grody and such. The teeth we yellowed with brown paint, darkest near the bottom and pearlier near the top.

The tongue we then took out of the mold and painted tongue-like colours over the red gelatin. We mostly used pink and brown. We also used some of the excess gelatin to wipe on the nose to make it look like a wet dog nose that was frankly a little boogery.

BEHOLD!

After we made all our pieces, it was time to apply them to our werewolf. First things first, we had a beardy werewolf and therefore we had to super Vaseline his face so his beard hairs didn't get ripped out of their beard follicles when we took the makeup off. We then did a base coat of black paint where we were going to put the jaw on his face.

We attached each jaw, starting with the bottom one, using more latex and cotton to adhere them as much as we possibly could to his face. The top jaw was a little more tricky to apply since it was so close to his eyes, but we gave him super fancy, plastic wrap eye patches to wear while we did this so he didn't get any latex in his eyeballs.

We painted the cotton to match the fur on the werewolf jaws with black and gray face paints.

We also made him lie down while we applied the makeup since the jaws were heavier pieces and we didn't want gravity to get the best of us.

We wanted to make it look like his werewolf face was bustin' out of his regular face so we made some torn skin out of cotton and latex. When these dried, we painted them with foundation and some matte powder to give them more of a skin-like texture and colour. We applied these using some latex, as well as some spirit gum.

Once these skin tears were applied we pulled them away a little bit from the jaw and painted the insides of them with fake blood and bruised to outsides with brown, black, purple and blue face paints.