Finishing the Box!!

After looking at all the test pieces I chose to use the cotton wool texture for the face and neck wounds as i felt these looked more infections as the texture is kind of bubbles rather than ruff like with the sand and saw dust. I also thought about the face piece that i had made and applied and how bulky it was so i also reduced the size and overall thickness particularly around the edges. I also managed to make some gunshot holes using the Derma wax  and latex on grease proof paper so i could pull it off as so far i had only applied them directly to the body. Normaly using derma wax you would roll out a sliver then make it into a ring, blend it into the skin and then use tweezers to pull on the wax to create that torn skin effect. However i managed to do the same but on wax paper them peeled it off and sealed the whole thing with latex making it less delicate. I was quite happy with my gunshot holes. 

I managed to punch out the labels for each element to the kit and luckily they all fit in the gaps. One of them is abit of a tight squeeze, i did think about the labels until after i had made the box so next time i would make the labels first to make sure they all fitted properly. 

I really like how my box is coming together so far. I used a wood varnish/polish stuff inside the box to make it look completely different. I wanted to do this as looking back over the project to write my presentation i though about the theatrical element to the kit. I had written a story in the instructions to make it more of a performance for the user, this then led me to think more about how the box would look. As i really like the copper labels i thought staining the wood on the inside would give the look of a display case or something. Kind of like the display cases is museums that are made of dark wood with labels to say what the curiosity's are inside it. I think it also added more theatre to it in the sense that you wouldn't know what was inside it until its open. I am not decorating the outside in anyway so it just looks like a plane box.

I used the wood varnish as i have experimented before with using tea, coffee, food colouring, material and drawing directly onto MDF. Coffee can give a shiny would like effect but it stinks of coffee and it stays quite sticky which wouldn't be good for the latex.

While i was finishing the box i realised i had made another zombie box with-out knowing. Whilst i have been practising making all the prosthetics i've been keeping everything in a shoe box with compartments i've made out of paper boxes.

Prosthetics

Ive been experimenting with mixing different materials in with the latex such as sand, saw-dust and cotton wool. It give very different textures and therefore the colours sit on it differently so some look more gruesome than others depending on the colour pallet.

                                              Cotton Wool                                          Sand

I also tried using saw dust. I had to make the prosthetics off the body on grease proof paper. It would have been  too uncomfortable to wait for it to dry on the skin and as i was also wanting to try one on the face it would be incredibly painful to take it off without the use of spirit gum. I find the spirit um really hard to use as it does not allow the prosthetic to move as naturally and comes up at the edges. Also it does not blend as well into the skin as latex directly applied does. After this attempt on the face I tried using spirit gum and applying latex around the edges of the prosthetic which helps it stick and blends it in much better also the small amount of latex is not as painful to take off.

Also looking back at the pictures I think I used too much colour and in the earlier pieces I did I used less bold colours. I also think the prosthetic itself is too big and chunky, or it at least would have befitted from having latex round the edges to blend it in more.

I've also been practising other types of wound still like this gunshot  although i am finding it hard to get pictures  of what I'm doing with the camera , the pictures are over saturated with colour which is not true to the light that i am making these under. For instance in the image below all the purple can clearly be picked out but this is because the flash has picked it out. I have tried using better cameras but this problem just seems to get worse.

Instruction booklet

I decided to re-design the booklet on Photoshop i kept some of the elements such as using black and white and the same layout. I used a typewriter font and generally neatened everything up so it looks more professional.I originally looked at using Halloween style fonts but to me it looked abit tacky. After using the letterpress i thought about using a more traditional style which looked much better. I still kept the booklet to the same scale, i think it works being small.

I also thought about different ways to bind the book together. I have bound books before so i remembered the basic stitch but i also experiments with using staples, a sewing machine and pins. I quite like the pins with its relevance to voodoo and the machine stitch.

Pins

 Traditional Stitch

 Staples

 Sewing Machine

Metal Work

I used the metal workshop to experiment with making metal labels either for the top of the box to say what's inside or as labels inside the box to match the instruction booklet so you know what's what. I may even use both.  Metal letter stamps can be used to stamp words onto soft metals. I chose copper as I new it could be heated up to give different colours and not look so shiny and new and it is also a soft metal. A drawback of this is that the font size is quite small so if it was to go on top of the box it might look abit small. The test pieces I used were only about 5cm wide and long which is small compared to the size of the box I have made. Also when stamping on metal the letters can be made out on the reverse side and there are reverse stamps to make use of this.

More spirit bottles!!

I have also made a few more Wanga or Zombie bottles as I think they are great visual and tactile objects. I think covering the hard glass in a soft material is somehow very satisfying, I think because we are so used to seeing glass bottles with are hard and reflective and the juxtaposition of the soft cotton is aesthetically interesting. I also think the messy stitching gives it that voodoo quality along with the colours. Black and red are often colours that symbolise horror or at least are colours often used in adverts posters anything visual to denote horror. I think the bottle where I have used mainly black with accents of red and white feels more like a prop for a horror film than the bottle where I have used lots of white. I also found that on the bottle where I had pulled out cotton thread and matted it together to create a textile didn't follow the silhouette of the bottle and doesn't look as visually interesting as the others. I have also used different shapes of bottle which give different silhouettes.

   

I want to develop this idea further as well after looking at Christine Boreland this made me think about how do you capture a spirit bottle? I also think it should have meaning to it as with the Wanga bottles although they are great to look at they have no other level than of being a prop. I do not come from that culture or practice of voodoo, also there is a ceremony and human bones that need to be put in for it to be genuine. Anyway it also made me thing about messages in bottles so I thought about putting words and images from my life as a visual way of putting my 'spirit' in a bottle. Although I think it could be quite a personal object that I may want to cover like the Wanga bottles but I guess that's just personal choice. I think I also want to look into message's in bottles as well as a further development from this idea

Message In A Bottle

From The Guinness World Record Website The oldest message in a bottle spent 92 years 229 days at sea. A bottom drift bottle, numbered 423B, was released by the Marine Laboratory, Aberdeen, UK at 60º 50'N 00º 38'W on 25 April 1914 and recovered by fisherman, Mark Anderson of Bixter, Shetland, UK, at 60º 50'N 00º 37'W on 10 December 2006.






This photo is of the actual handwritten message in that bottle.

Boxes!!!!!!!!!!

This is by far the most practical and satisfying thing I've ever made! The box is 30cm by 20 cm, I made it out of MDF as it was readily available and I have been inducted into this workshop all ready. I did think about using plastic and the laser cutter, however as I am not inducted into these areas and time was an issue I used wood. I was quite happy to use wood as I like the texture and the smell. I also finished it by adding a lid. I will now fill it with prosthetics and other elements to bring it to life!

Letter Press for Booklet

 
                In developing the booklet to go along with the kit I used the letterpress the do some tests so see how it compared the hand making them. I tried out simply printing the text onto different coloured papers. However I discovered that when you roll the roller over the metal letters to ink them it leaves an impression on the roller. This image can then be rolled out to create a 'ghost' of the image. I just wanted to use plain black as i feel using colour could give it a cartoon feel I don't want. I quite like the negative 'ghost' images that were left by the roller, I felt they had more character although it was much harder to get readable text. I also used some thick tracing paper I had previously experimented with to do the ghost prints on as the text can only be read on the reverse side.
However some of the drawback to the letterpress are the limited amount of fonts and styles to choose from, i had to pick something that i felt best suited the style. Another issues with the fonts is the sizes, as i am working on such a small scale (a7) i can only        really use the letterpress for the front cover as 30pt is one of the smallest sizes they have and it limits the font styles too.
I do like to use the letterpress as i think it has more character that   printing directly from a computer