Base Ears wip (Patreon)

After priming and putting aside the to-be-painted-tomorrow Trico head, I decided the next thing to work on was his ears. The mold was all done, and I had had a set of generic 'flesh' coloured (very orangey skin tone) ears set overnight.

I pulled them out but managed to tear the top half of one off lol. These molds are particularly fragile due to the very thin elements combined with the hole in the ear. I could easily break this mold if I was careless. No problem though, since they were always going to be an unusable test. 

I brought up some refs of Trico ears and tried to determine the pale base colour. Kind of a sickly pale/pink flesh tone. I put the pigment into each part of the silicone in separate cups, since I wanted to get the colour perfect before I mixed them together and the countdown timer started to get them poured. 

I also used a lot of flocking (tiny red fibers/powder). This helps w/ realism a crazy amount. It gives that uneven speckling through what would otherwise be a flat colour. 

I added an absolute tonne of spray release into the molds. Since silicone bonds to silicone I was not taking any chances (especially with this fragile mold). Felt was added to the top of the silicone once it was poured. Since the silicone will bond to the fibers while it is wet, I can glue the felt base onto wherever I need. 

The silicone seems to take much longer to set with heavy pigmenting (3 hrs vs 20 mins). I was extremely careful pulling these out, making sure not to put too much pressure on the ears (trying to yank them out) and easing the very tips out with thin paddlepop sticks. They came out no problem. 

I've since painted them (but will do a separate writeup when they are dry).