I Have Started Corpsing

Did the title get you going? A real grabber eh? When I tell people I have been corpsing, the reactions I get are quite hilarious. Some of you may know what I am talking about and to a lot of you, trust me it is not what you might be thinking.

We have hit mid September all of a sudden. Time is flying by and I am seriously getting behind in the projects I need to be doing for halloween. The good thing is that I have figured out what I am 'dressing up' as last year.

I am one of those people that go big for halloween. It's my time to shine, once a year on something that I really like without people looking at me weird. So I take the occasion and go big. Some like Christmas, some like Valentines day. To each our own, right?

So the preparations begin.

Corpsing is when you take a skeleton or a skull and transform it into something that looks like it is decaying. A corpse.

This is the first time I do it. The process is easy. But to get it to look right takes a little bit of time. I am not a painter. I've painted before but never to make a skull look realistic. So some research is required to make it look right and practice.

I started using old cheap skulls that I have had for quite some time. I think they might be from Dollarama or Walmart. You don't need an expensive skull/skeleton to do the job.

What you will need with that is:

• Plastic sheet

This costed me $3 and something from Walmart. It is made for covering your floors when painting. Walmart didn't have a vast variety. They offered either a cloth material or this really thin plastic. Other Walmarts may carry better items.

• Heat gun

I borrowed my dad's heat gun. You can easily find this at any hardware stores and I was told they are not that expensive. Thinking $30 maybe?

• Stain

I wasn't sure of how dark the color would be. I did go with Kona, on the darker side, knowing that I would be painting plastic and on white, trying to prevent having to do multiple layers. This costed me about $15 give or take.

• Scissors.

• Paint brush.

• Paper towel

Do I need to take a picture of the scissors, paper towel and paintbrush? I just grabbed paint brushes from Dollarama. I grabbed soft bristles as to not tear away the plastic.

The process

This is just a practice rond to get a feel of what I was doing. Wrap the skull in plastic as shown. You can tape the back of it to help keep it in place if you like. I didn't bother with that, I have no tape :p It worked just fine without it.
Plug in the heat gun and aim it at the plastic. The idea is to 'shrink wrap' it, letting the plastic make holes as though it is flesh decaying, rotting away.

So the plastic I have is a bit thin and shrank a bit too much. But that's ok. Jus add another layer of plastic if that happens to you and keep on going with the heat gun. Keeping in mind that the closer you are and the father away you are does change the effects to the plastic.

As you can see there is a bit of texture round the mouth, like if the skin was ripping apart. Perfect. The only thing I can complain about is because of the plastic being quite thin, the holes of the eyes opened up way too fast thus giving too big of holes that I wanted. And also that the skulls did not have opened mouths. That is 2 things...

And so we go on to painting once satisfied enough. Because of this being a practice round, I let my little girl be my helper.
The way to do it is paint on it and then wipe it with a paper towel. This helps so that you do not get a solid dark brown skull entirely.

Once doing that all over, you can either be satisfied with that you did or add more plastic to have more texture.
I let my girl do what she wanted with this one and this is how it turned out.

The stain is a bit too dark actually and can't really see all the details. So with this I made another one.

This time I started with wrapping it twice. The eye holes once more getting too big than what I wanted That part is quite frustrating. I added more plastic to play around with it. Pulling it to bunch up more to one area to get that pulling effect at the mouth.
Then I added the stain but Not on the skull itself. I wanted to work with the skull to get a different look. Perhaps being more grey or something. Unsure of hot to make it look right.

I set the two skulls aside and started working on other things. Like this small skeleton. About the length of my forearm. All for good practice.

I wrapped this guy up 3 times thinking I would get something great from it.

Bad idea to it that way. The limbs were all stuck together. I had to cut it all up and remove the plastic and start over. Covering only parts at a time. It was long to do because of all the mini parts.

I kept on doing more skulls after that.

I have done a total of 4 (or 5) skulls but only the 2 painted that I am showing in this post.

I didn't let the skull completely dry before painting because I was too anxious to finish them. The one my daughter did, I added some yellow paint to add definition.
The one I made I wanted to have a different look so I used Ivory black and yellow paint mixed together for the skull and then went around with yellow and green (not mixed) for definition.

You can see that my painting skills for this kind of thing is not so great. So honestly if you have any tips for me on making this look better, more awesome let me know. I am not quite satisfied with it but I do say that I like the look of the one on the left, using the stain on the skull as well but I do like more the one of the right because it has more earthy tones. I think combining the 2 will perhaps give me more of a look I was trying to go for (?). Calling all artists out there! Tell me what you think on making this better.

For now I continue to corpse more skeletons and skulls, holding off to paint till I gain the proper knowledge. I looked at images but it doesn't tell me what colors or where to highlight or how to get the effect.
Nevertheless, I think it still looks better than just a plain ol skull :D