CIMG5036 My face is completely covered in alginate, up close
CIMG5036 My face is now completely covered in alginate. I must say, having your eyes and mouth glued shut induces a bit of a claustrophobic feeling in you. But not so bad as to not be able to get through it. With more practice it may get easier.
The thing protruding from my mouth is a piece of corrugated cardboard that allows me to breathe through my mouth during the process. Normally, M would put straws in the “model’s” nostrils for breathing, but I can’t breathe through my nose, so I had to use this. However, it kind of ruined the cast: the mask turned out to have a weird gaping expression.
The end goal of this process was to make a plaster mask of my face, as documented step by step in my blog post. This was done by my friends M and P. They used to make plaster masks based on real human faces. They would first make a cast of a person’s face from alginate, a gooey material that captures the shape of your facial features to a tiniest detail. On its basis they would make an actual mask out of plaster.
February 2007, Austin, Texas
