Post 4: Fifty reasonably skin-coloured balloons go by

I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great god, His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscle and arteries beneath...

— Victor Frankenstein

When I made my stop motion puppet, above, I used ordinary acrylic paint as skin after building up the head with papier-mâché. I won't be trying that this time round as it left a rather uneven finish and, more to the point, would show the joins on this puppet's jaw. Right from the start I decided to give latex a try.

Thing is, I've done little work with latex and hoped to take a shortcut by finding ready-made latex skin, of a sort...

Hopping on eBay I found a packet of fifty balloons in a colour (officially called "ivory cream") which serves as a reasonable skin tone. I've actually had these for a while now - they arrived before the polystyrene head, which I also bought online - and in the meantime I experimented with stretching them over various objects. The nozzles turned out to be surprisingly accommodating - I even managed to get the end of a Coke bottle in one - but would they fit the head? Well...

The short answer is a firm no: for one, the head was just too slippery to be inserted into a balloon. Instead I cut a balloon in half and tried to stretch it over the head and pin it in place.

It didn't take long for me to realise that this just wasn't working, but I carried on mainly for the comedy value. The drawing pins I was using were too short and kept popping out, so I had to use something longer - the longest things I had at hand being cocktail sticks. Balloon rubber is also hard to cut with any accuracy, resulting in some incredibly wonky eyeholes. On the other hand, once you cut a balloon in half, it begins to tear down the edges very easily, so there was no way I could cover the whole head.

Moral of the story: don't use balloons as skin.

After this object lesson I decided to do it properly and mold some latex skin of my own. In the meantime, I found a way of keeping the car in place while also finding a use for the copper wire which was too heavy for the wheels to lift - two birds with one stone!

That said, I do wonder how long it will last. Now, when I have to remove the car to recharge it (which is quite a bit) I'll have to remove the copper wire as well. How long before it starts to get a bit loose? Oh well, I suppose I can pad the holes with blu-tack.