You know, we've cut her ears off.

This is a witch without ears.

Now I wanna lay her down, and obviously her big shoulders

are in the way, but I wanna lay her down

'cause I'm gonna take a little alginate snap mold

of this area that we just did.

So I was thinking you could lay her down on anything.

I was thinking a bag of white clay, but that is too tall

to get a nice horizontal angle for her.

So I happened to figure out just a minute ago

that this nice pillow of Accu-Cast, which is our alginate,

is just about the right height.

So I'm gonna put that there, I'm gonna put a little form pad

on it to protect our sculpture,

and I'm gonna stick her like that.

So that's pretty good.

What I have ready at the table

is everything you're gonna need.

I have plaster bandages, buckets.

I have water sources ready.

I have alginate ready, white clay.

I have my famous clay cutter that I believe you saw

in the last episode.

And we're gonna get to work here.

So the first thing I want to do, I'm gonna cut a nice

thick slab of white clay.

I wanna get my mold knife out

which is here.

So there's a fettling knife, this is actually called.

With a fettling knife, we fettle,

and here's our slab of clay.

I'm just gonna cut it in half and all I'm using this clay

for is to prop her up so that she's not

going all over the place while we're trying to do that.

Now we can take our adjustable clay cutter,

which you just saw me use,

and we're gonna change to roughly about 1/2 an inch.

I'm gonna take another slice off my clay,

and move that aside.

And all I'm gonna do is, I've got a straight edge,

I'm gonna cut a wall, cut some strips,

about an inch and a 1/2, what have you, it's not critical.

I'm gonna make a little bit of a wall around here

so I don't have to make a gigantic mold.

I don't have to get alginate all over my sculpture.

This is a very crude wall.

I'm not gonna get too carried away with it.

I am thinking about what my final piece is gonna be

and how big it's gonna be.

And I'm also going to look at the ear

and make sure for the final buck,

the positive that this ear will be

permanently sat on and completed,

that there's enough plaster around the ear.

So what we're doing is we're taking a mold here.

We're gonna make a plaster piece that this ear will

then sit on and be finished

and then a mold will be made on top of that.

So we're making a plaster piece that has

all the witchy textures that I'm gonna match this down to.

So I'm just making sure as I'm making my little mold here,

nothing has to be perfect,

but we'll work as cleanly as possible.

I'm just making sure there's enough plaster

and witch texture represented

around the ear.

And we can make a cut here, 'cause that's all we need.

Put that together.

Again this is crude, but it's fine.

We can clean it all up later.

I'm gonna add a tiny bit here because,

as I pour my alginate, that's the dip

where it's all gonna run out.

So I'm just gonna add a little bit there.

So I mean that looks like a healthy amount of detail

and plaster and clay around the ear.

When you're working mold walls like this,

try not to do what I'm doing right now.

Try not to get in there with your fingers

and make all kinds of finger printy stuff.

Try to just use your clay as a wall, you stick it,

you leave it alone.

All right, you butt the next one up.

You maybe smoosh a little bit together.

But try to work cleanly.

If that's your wall and you stick it there, you're done.

Don't get in there, and I see all kinds

of beginning mold makers get in there

and they're doing this and trying to make it all perfect

and they end up with that.

They end up with this horrible lumpy mess.

So here we have Accu-Cast alginate,

prosthetic grade alginate.

You can use any brand of alginate.

My recommendation, honestly, for this work

is buy a nice cheap alginate

because basically we're making a lot waste molds.

We call them waste molds because you're gonna pour

one thing out of it and throw it away, okay.

So don't buy prosthetic grade cream,

you know the very expensive stuff.

This is perfectly fine.

There might even be cheaper solutions, I'm not sure.

And we're not gonna need a ton of this.

That's probably more than plenty.

This is alcohol.

I'm smoothing some clay, and cleaning a little clay dust.

You could use water if you were in love with your sculpture

and didn't want to smooth it, but I'm also smoothing

some sculpture in here as we go.

Okay, so there's that.

We have our alginate, we have our water source.

We need another bucket for plaster bandages.

So we'll just put a little water in there.

Hot water will make your bandages go faster.

This is not hot water.

So always alginate, always add

water into the powder, never the opposite way around.

It's completely different than stone.

Stone you add powder into the water.

This is the opposite.

So you just mix that up.

Thick is fine for this.

You're just capturing not a lot of detail.

You're just getting a form basically.

You want what detail is there,

but that's not even finished detail yet.

That is the rough approximation of finished detail.

You're gonna see as we go through this process,

you're gonna finish all the finished, finished,

finished detail on the separate little molds.

So you're not done sculpting.

There's still sculpting to be done.

So there we are, nice and creamy.

It could have been thicker, it's fine like this.

I'm just gonna put it in there,

and really kinda mush it down,

make sure I am getting whatever detail there is.

You could put it in with a brush if you'd like.

Again, you're more worried about basic form.

So this getting thicker already.

And the next thing we're gonna do once this thickens up

is just put a little plaster bandage shell around it

to hold it in place.

What we're gonna be doing in this process

is a lot of little mini lifecasts like this.

Once we cut this apart and put it in the water,

we're gonna take all the clay pieces off except,

well, you'll see.

The head part will be the first part we finish, the cowl,

because that'll be the first part we put on the actress

will be the overall headpiece.

All the other pieces are gonna key onto that.

So we will finish off the headpiece first

and then we'll slowly start adding back the other pieces

and taking little molds so that they all

fit together with their wrinkles.

It'll all come clear as we do it.

I know right now that might seem a little mysterious.

You could use gloves for this if you wanted to.

I find that this is such a gummy material

that I find it hard to work in gloves with this.

But this is perfectly safe, inert.

You could put this in your mouth

although it doesn't taste good.

They have separate dental alginate for mouth castings

that has a minty taste.

This tastes like chalk.

And I'm just waiting for it to set up.

Now we're gonna do the same thing to the other side.

They actually give ratios on this for how you mix it.

I just mixed it by eyeball

'cause I've been doing it for years.

But on this particular brand, they say

a good average consistency is approximately four to one.

That would be two ounces of powder

to eight fluid ounces of water,

four ounces of powder to 16 fluid ounces of water,

eight ounces of powder to 32 fluid ounces of water,

and so on.

So they actually give you ratios on this one.

That's news to me.

You'd have to do a test and see what their ratio gives you.

Obviously this could have been thicker

than what I made it but it's fine.

You wouldn't want it any runnier than this,

so you'd have to try out their ratios in a little cup

or a little test batch to make sure that their idea

of what's good is not too runny.

It's definitely gotten to be like jelly or jam

on the top here.

It's not running anymore.

It's not gonna go anywhere, but it's not quite setup

enough for us to do our thing yet.

While I'm waiting for that to completely harden,

I'll rip up a few plaster bandages.

We're not gonna use many.

We won't use more than a roll.

I like to make them two ply thick.

Some people go three, some people go four.

By two ply I mean I fold it over once,

so it's two bandages instead of one.

I think we went through some of this on the lifecasting

when we did Cynthia's hands.

It's kind of whatever you like.

I do at least two play.

I haven't used a single layer plaster bandage

in years and years and years,

probably not since I was first starting out.

But you could fold this over once,

you could fold it over twice,

you could fold it over four times,

whatever gets you through.

Personally in this instance, because we're only really

trying to capture a form here,

you could have made six layer plastic bandages

and just done one layer on here and been done.

I like just the two layers to capture all the detail

and get around all the nooks and crannies and all that.

But then you could start backing it up with four layers,

six layers, whatever, just to get through it.

So this is a holdover of lifecasting

which is what we're basically doing here.

Okay, our alginate is setup here and we're gonna get

to the plaster bandage part.

But because we're at Legacy Effects today,

I thought I could show you a different way

to go about this tool.

This is my famous adjustable clay cutter

that we love so much.

If you don't have one of these or don't have access

to one of these, lots of times you see the

two dowels with a wire between them, a garrote, if you will,

or even if you won't, that is a clay cutter.

How you get a nice controlled thickness like this,

if you just take that and go across a block of clay

this gives you a nice, smooth, even slab.

There's another way to go about it and I just happened

to find these here at Legacy today

because they have all the fancy stuff,

this is another thing you can do.

This is a board with, they have machined aluminum on here,