Custom Phicen figure creation

I decided to start an entirely new thread dedicated to creating sculptures and molds for seamless figures, with information on how to do them. Anyone else attempting to do the same thing is welcome to contribute.

I finally got around to making a mold of my s29. I used Smooth-On Compat 45 for this particular mold. Most tutorials have you clay up one side of the model, pour the material on top of that, and once it dries take the clay out, flip it, and do the other side. I thought I could skip this step to save some money but it resulted in messing up the mold. I just poured enough Compat 45 to fill up half the mold, let it cure, then poured the second half right on top of it, but that resulted in bubbles forming on bottom half when they floated up to the surface. So, don't do that, lol. I'm getting some clay now for my second attempt at making a mold.



You can see the big bubble on one side of the mold, plus a bunch of smaller ones throughout the rest of the body. For my next attempt I think I'm going to try the Smooth-On Moldstar 30. Compat 45 is a urethane, so I had to wear a respirator and do the mixing/pouring outside because my studio apartment has (censored) ventilation. Since the weather is going start getting cold I won't be able to do that for much longer either, since cold temperatures can apparently inhibit curing. The cured final is quite nice, just a bit of a pain to make.

I went ahead and tried pouring silicone into the mold to do some testing and go through the process, but I also messed that up the first go around. I plugged the holes where the feet/hands are with some clay, but this alone wasn't strong enough to hold back the liquid silicone and the mold ended up leaking all over the place, so I stopped pouring partway through. Next time I'll have to secure everything more tightly with duct tape.

Anyways, I used Smooth-On ecoflex 20 for this figure with some Silc Pig brown to color the skin. The color ended up being a wonderful shade of brown. The picture below has baby powder added to the figure, so it looks a little bit chalky at the moment. Silicone is super shiny otherwise. I need to see if I can get my hands on a more translucent matting agent, or maybe try brown chalk pastels dabbed onto a thin layer of silicone to seal them in place and reduce the shininess.



I need to make my next mold a bit better so that the skeleton can properly stay in place. You can see parts of the body where it comes too close to the surface, because it was shifting around in the mold as I was pouring.

One really great thing I figured out was how to get rid of the seams that inevitably show up as a result of using a mold. If you take the silicone and dilute it with solvent, and brush it on in layers you can cover up or fill in the parts where there's a visible seam line. In this picture I painted the area around her hip.



The seam line is almost invisible, especially once you put some matte on and get rid of the shine. It looked something like this before.



The biggest downside I ran into here was the very tiny bubbles that popped up in spots across the body. I thought Ecoflex 20 would be liquid enough to not require degassing, but clearly I'm mistaken.



You can see all of the little bubbles pretty clearly by her ankle. I'm not sure there's any way around that except for using a vacuum chamber, which was an expense I was hoping to avoid. Although now that I'm nearly at the end of the tunnel in terms of making a permanent, brown skinned Phicen, I'll probably bite the bullet and get one.

That's all the time and material I have for this project. I have a deadline at the end of this month so I don't think I can work on this anymore until November. If I can get this to work to my satisfaction, then I'm going to try sculpting my own body and creating a totally new Phicen body with a re-used skeleton.

Thank you for sharing your technique and experience. I realize this was an early attempt and you have noted all sorts of improvements for the next one, but it is already very promising. So the two halves (front and back) are glued together after curing?

No you put the two halves of the mold together and pour into it, then when the silicone has cured you pull the mold apart and you have a complete body. I screwed up the pour process however and had silicone leaking all over the place, so I just stopped and ended up with half a figure.

gooboo wrote:No you put the two halves of the mold together and pour into it, then when the silicone has cured you pull the mold apart and you have a complete body. I screwed up the pour process however and had silicone leaking all over the place, so I just stopped and ended up with half a figure.

Ah, now it clarifies things... I thought that's how one did it.

Good luck, gooboo. I hope you figure it out. Did you get a vacuum chamber for the silicone?

I'll probably get one next month. Already blew through my "fun" budget for October.

This looks very promising. Thank you for sharing your process! I'm looking forward to your update.

Very exciting start. I'm always amazed what can be accomplished by "hobby pioneers" like you, Gooboo.
I keep my finger crossed that you can work out the problem with the bubbles!

this is awesome. if not for the costs (and my lack of skills) a t-800 endo skeleton figure and this technique would make a childhood dream of mine come true, creating a real battle damaged terminator figure. and a reusable one at that too. i don't know if it was a kenner toy but i remember in the early 90s having a small terminator figure with a clay mold.
this technique right here could be the real deal

Just some messing around, trying to use up the remaining urethane rubber I have left. I tried making some molds of two heads, then casting them in silicone. The heads are very squishy, and bubbly since I don't have a vacuum chamber.

These molds have too many flaws to cast a finished product in, but I think I'll use them as a base mold to pour Monster Clay into and sculpt new heads.

Still, neat idea.

Very cool!
Thank you for posting this gooboo.

Any knowledge of how to get just the skeletons?

Cut them out from an existing TBLeague figure.

Bit the bullet and ordered a vacuum pump/chamber, as well as some clay. I'll probably make another attempt at creating a mold sometime later this month.

Well I didn't end up attempting to make another silicone casting due to work, but I started sculpting some new bodies recently. This prototype here is going to be a slight modification of the s28/29, but ultimately I want to do new body types that Phicen has neglected, namely muscular/athletic bodies.



I need some more skeletons. Does anyone have any torn/discolored/otherwise ruined Phicens they would be willing to part with for $10-15 each plus shipping? I need the metal armature to be intact, but otherwise the condition of the "skin" doesn't matter. Specifically, I'm looking for s10/12, s22/23, s28/29, s46/47/Viking Woman, and s38/39 armatures at the moment.

Obviously this is more directed at US based people, as I imagine international shipping would be too expensive for me to be worth it.

So are we looking at a silicone sculpt?

No that's a WIP clay sculpt that I will make a mold from, then cast silicone into at some point.

gooboo wrote:No that's a WIP clay sculpt that I will make a mold from, then cast silicone into at some point.

Ok, makes sense -- I was wondering how silicone would look like that.

Oooh! Still very exciting! Thank you for your pioneer work, and particularly the focus on those muscular/athletic bodies, though the S29 is still among my faves so seeing a modification of that is always welcome, too.

Test run on a new method for mold making. Instead of a two-piece mold, I think I'm going to try using the one-piece cut mold method. I made a mold of a s12 and cast clay into it.







The silicone I used was pretty clear, but I made the mold walls too thick. I couldn't really see/position the armature in the mold properly, so next time I'll have to make the mold container smaller and closer to the contour of the figure so I can see and manipulate the armature better. Using a one-piece mold should ultimately be faster than a sandwich mold since there won't be a seam running across the entire figure that I have to clean up later, only a smaller one towards the top of the body.

This is promising! Can you not cut bits of this mold away? Sharp knife? Hot wire?

Well ultimately this was a test mold so I don't really need to make it perfect. I'll probably cut this one up into little pieces and recycle the silicone once I start making actual production molds.

Looks like a nice attempt.

I agree, it seems very promising.

I watched a tutorial on the Stan Winston School website years ago that covered how to successfully implant a skeleton into a silicone body while casting, I'll try to see if I can find it again.

How does the 1 part mold seem otherwise? Any problems with bubbles?
I know in silicone maskmaking they usually have to have vents for silicone to seep out of to make sure it's actually reaching/filling those hard-to-get areas--not sure if it'll be necessary for something simple like this but just in case you see any problem areas.

What silicone are you using for the mold vs for the body when you cast it? Or is the silicone mold just for the clay versions? (In which case I'd assume you'd end up needing a 2 part mold at some point anyway.) What mold release?

Come to think of it, I wonder if the Stan Winston School would have any videos on this sort of thing, I haven't delved into their toy making or maquette making videos yet. The skeleton video I recall was from a series on animations "tentacle" puppets though--so that was also articulated but in a more simplified way (I think it was like an alien worm or smth, not an actual tentacle lol)