Creating Mystique's Belt
This was a commission from FSCW. Since the belt needed to be
wrestled in I needed to work with something aside from plastics. I decided to go with Vytaflex from Smooth-on which is a urethane rubber. I went with Vytaflex 20 because it is soft and has a shorter cure time of 16 hours. Some other resins have a 24 hour cure time. Smooth-on does also have other rubbers to work with but this one worked the best for what I needed.
I got this commission a bit last minute and I already had some projects on the line. So I decided to try to find some skulls that would work about the size I needed. After a bit of looking I was able to find these which saved me some time.
I did a quick mold set up. I submerged the skulls in clay and cleaned up around the sides. You may have watched me do this on Twitch. I stuck in some flashing into the clay. Made sure to add clay on any edges to prevent any leaking.
I used rebound 25 for my mold. I cut up some older silicone mold pieces to mix into it to save on materials. All the products I am using for this project are from smooth-on. I typically work with just rebound for all my molds currently. It is a silicone mold that can be painted on in thin layers or poured. So you have the option of doing very thin layers and making a mother mold to save on materials.
Vytaflex 20 has a 30 min pot life and 16 hour cure time. Most the vytaflex has 16 hour cure times so keep that in mind. The difference between any of them is mostly how soft the rubber is. I went with a very soft version for safety purposes. Also working with rubber is very smelly I found out. So a mask is very important. Otherwise gloves are always needed for everything. You do not want any of these materials on your hands. Also be sure to read the safety bulletins first.
I used Cast Magics color GoldFinger for the gold finish. Smooth-on offers a lot of other powder finishes. Just brush the powder into the mold and clean out any extra build-up of powder. The material will pick-up all the powder.
I mixed a smaller batch of Vytaflex and added in the so-strong black tint. I carefully painted it in with a paint brush. The disadvantage of working with rubbers is they aren't really paintable. So this method I came up with works. There are other silicone materials that you can paint and air-brush they are just more expensive.
I used aqua seal to glue the skulls onto a white elastic band. Since I was limited to just fabric and soft materials this was the best idea I came up with. The glue worked really well to attach the rubber to fabric materials. I'm sure there are other things or other brands you could try out. But this made it through a few wrestling matches and not even close to detaching. You can get it through Amazon prime and its fair priced.
