My partner Shayna and I decided to attend the NYC Resistor Halloween party as The Lone Wanderer and Hancock from Fallout 4. She went all-out to create an exceptional spandex costume, and I wanted to build something that would at least prevent me from looking like a schlub in comparison.

I haven’t sculpted by hand in a while, let alone made an FX prop, but this felt like a manageable chunk to bite off. I started with a face casting, which Shayna built up out of alginate. From there, I made a plaster positive of that casting, and began sculpting a ghoul nose that made it look like my actual nose had fallen off due to intense mutating radiation.

Once I had the sculpture laid out, I added a gutter around the sculpture, waxed the prop, and made a mold box around it to pour a 1-part casting. Then, I removed the sculpture from the silicone, broke down the sculpture to get the original plaster casting back, and mixed up some silicone pigment to match my skin tone as much as possible.

From there, I ran a few castings to try and get something as bubble-free as possible (with mixed success). If I tried this all again, I’d definitely plan around paths for bubbles exiting the mold in a more robust way. However, vacuum casting and the general forgiving nature of zombie makeup ended up pulling this prosthetic through.

I mixed up some silicone with a thixotropic to create a sculpting putty, patched the prosthetic, and then went on to detailing it with some tinted silicone adhesive. I applied the prosthetic using that same adhesive as well and added some basic makeup. I’d intended to stick the bald cap down too, but it was already uncomfortably hot in my lab, and I wanted to avoid becoming a hot sweaty mess during the dance party.