I meant to post this months ago, but I got a bit sidetracked. For Halloween last year I decided to try something outside of my comfort zone, I have never done any sculpting, molding, or casting before and figured I would give it a shot. What do you think? Am I Groot?
I started by sculpting a Groot head from some clay that I had laying around (thanks Dad!) using some reference pictures that I printed out. Once I was fairly happy with the sculpt, I coated it in silicone to make a mold.
A few coats of silicone later, I added fiberglass to make a mother-mold for rigidity. After awkwardly trying to pour polyfoam into the disassembled mold, quickly putting the concrete cast of my head inside it, and clamping the mold back together - I ended up with a lot of polyfoam all over myself, all over the floor of my basement, and this mask:
As you can see, there are a lot of rough spots that I had to patch up, but overall I was pretty happy with it. After a lot of patching and a little paint, it looked like this:
I had some leftover tinted Plexiglas from an old arcade cabinet, so I cut out a couple of eye sized pieces with a Dremel tool and used a heat gun to give them a curved shaped. I then hot glued them to the inside of the mask so that my eyes would not be visible when wearing it.
I used a different method for the rest of the body. I bought some pipe insulation from Home Depot and cut it into varyious lengths, tapering the ends down to points. Once they were in shapes that I liked, I hot glued them to a turtle neck which I had placed on my duct tape mannequin (this took a LOT longer then I thought it would).
For the chest plates I cut sections of thin EVA foam floor mats into bark-like shapes and used the Dremel tool to carve wood grain patterns into them.
In order to texture the pipe insulation sections I took some non-quilted paper towels and soaked them in a mixture of mod-podge, water, and acrylic paint (I figured the paint could act as a base coat and make later steps a little easier). Once the paper towel strips were soaked, I draped them over each vine striation and crinkled them along the grain line to approximate a bark texture.
Here is a video of a movement test once the first section of textured pieces had dried. It inhibited movement some, but was not too bad (movement got much more difficult once the entire body was covered in the glue towels).
Once the entire thing was textured (which took forever...), I painted the body to match the mask and it looked pretty much like this:
