Alien Egg Painting
As part of the Light Field Lab holographic kiosks production, we had a considerable amount of physical pieces to produce. One piece in particular were the custom sculpted egg replicas from the “Alien” franchise. As we are not primarily a fabrication shop or special effects studio, we had the huge task of learning some movie making special effects tricks to pull off realistic looking props for the kiosk design. Luckily for us, one of our team members had extensive experience in prosthetics, painting and filmmaking and an overall love of creatures.
Once the eggs were sculpted they were handed over to be painted in our makeshift creature shop. Since we were starting from the ground up, we enlisted the help of a local special effects artist to show us a few tricks of the trade. After a crash course, our internal artist went to work on over 50 different eggs. Various egg were made from different materials, whether they needed to be backlit or were meant to move by internal mechanisms. That meant each one required a different painting technique.
The easiest eggs to paint were the expanding foam versions. This material allowed us to use spray paint as a base and acrylic with a final coat of oil for realism.
Next were the Epoxy eggs, these eggs were probably the most durable and easiest to work with. We used oil based paint and the material really responded well. With this version you could really get nice looking colors and blending effects. Unfortunately they were the most expensive to cast and did not have the flexibility and translucency we were looking for, as our plan was to light a group of the eggs from the inside with LEDs.
The final and most difficult to paint were the silicone eggs. Silicone was by far the hardest to work with. This is where our session with Dina Cimarusti came in handy. She taught us about the importance of silicone painting and that silicone will only stick to silicone. For these we used a few different techniques. Airbrushing, coating and brushes and texturing. The thing with silicone is you have to mix and thin out the paints with naphtha which is a harsh smelling and toxic chemical. The naphtha made the process that much more difficult as you had to have proper ventilation and wear a respirator to avoid from breathing in the noxious fumes.
The benefits of using silcone paint is the realistic and lifelike quality you can achieve. Airbrushing turned out to be too time consuming, as some of our “hero” eggs were pretty big therefore it took several coats to get some opacity in the egg. What we found worked the best was to bathe them in a layer of silicone paint for a base and airbrush shadows with darker colors and use lighter colors for highlights.
Once the egg was at a good place, we would use a paper towel to blot paint giving the egg some skin texture. It was imortant not to go too dark on the silicone eggs as we still wanted to install LEDs inside to be able to give an eerie glow to each one.
Author: Brian Keller