"In The Hall Of The Pirate Council" Project.

During the Spring term at College we were given a brief to design a male and female pirate characters. We were all placed in group of three to complete this task. Within my group we decided that one would create the female pirate and the other two would produce the male character with more of a techincal edge to it. I was working on the male character.
We began by researching pirate history, culture, disease and skin conditions when exposed to the sea and harsh weather. With all our research collected we wrote a short character history. Our male pirate was around fifty years old. His eye had been gouged out in an altercation and had healed closed. The female character was his wife. She had been working in the theatres of Beijing when she was captured by pirates and forced to marry the Captain. Her theatreical kabuki make up still remained but was faded with tears. She also shaves her head and has her story tattooed in Chinese on it.
As there were two of us working on the male pirate we split the work load. One sculpted a whole face prosthetic and I created a wig. We both casted our models face and tested make up and prosthetic application.
To make a whole face prosthetic the sculpt needed to be split into three sections. To do this, my collegue completed the sculpt then created lines which would fit together subtly when applying the prosthetic pieces. she then floated off the pieces and applied them to three copies of the face cast ready to be plastered and made into moulds.
Here are photos of the prosthetic process...

As my collegue worked on sculpting the prosthetic, I made a wig for our male character. I chose to make a dreadlocked wig. I wanted to make it look as though his hair had dreadlocked itself through poor maintainance and the exposure to sea salt. I had this in mind when selecting hair to use. I bought frizzy hair which looked accurate to how the hair would look ina a sea setting.
Once I had covered the wig lace in hair, I wanted to add a little bit more length. To create more length I made ladders using galloon then sewed hair onto them then sewed them onto the wig lace. I then began to dreadlock the hair. I looked on various websites and found different videos explaining how to dreadlock the hair and ended up mixing various ideas and accidentally finding my own method. I warmed the dreadlock wax into my hands and rubbed them together with hair in between them. This dreadlocked the hair well. It wasn't extremely tight like usualy dreadlocks, but it looked as though his hair had naturally got to that state.
I then trimmed the wig and tied the dreads that were hanging over the face to the back using hair to tie them up. I then threaded beads through some strands of hair to finish it.
Here is how I made it...

Here are the final pictures...