Naga Skull : Prop Making

I started this one for a gallery show to exhibit prop makers art. The goal was to replicate a decorative skull from the Naga people

The Naga people are a headhunting tribe. The skulls are trophies from battle. These first 3 pictures are of the skull I sculpted.

the only 2 reference photos I could find are the next 2 pictures

Reference photos

To start I bought these skulls for haloween from value village and hacked them apart with a dremel. Deepening the eye sockets cutting out the hokey teeth and the nasal cavity.

In Illustrator I traced the pattern on the reference skull and tried to translate that directly onto the plastic skulls with sharpy and water colour marker

My original plan was to make the teeth out of translucent sculpey. I pushed some into a mouth gaurd for the first batch.

Here is the first test set of sculpey teeth that I scenic painted

                            and an individual tooth I sculpted and scenic painted. At this point the sculpey seemed to brittle so I moved on to a harder and more expensive alternative.

dental moulds- using dental alginate I made a casting of my teeth

I poured the teeth out of dental acrylic and they were much stronger

I fixed the dental acrylic teeth into the mouth with apoxie sculpt - and resculpted the pallet to hide the seams

Here is another skull I used to test stains so as not to screw up my final version

Here it looks like a bandanna, I used tape to cover the holes before I filled it with spray foam. The foam helped me to carve out the eye sockets and nasal cavity.  

Here is the skull with its first primer coat primer coat

 and here the first stages of scenic painting. I found on my tester the subtle staining shows through the woodstain. Without it the colour looks flat and unrealistic.

Its hard to see here but I masked the teeth before I painted the skull

The stain is mohagany wood stain and black acrylic wash to darken up skull designs

as well as some mud and cocoa to add to its age

with the teeth still white it didn t look as authentic so I stained the teeth as well.

finished bone scenic

I matched the pattern of weaving through the nose the best I could. I also carved a larger hole in the sinus cavity. But the leather was too thick, after more research I found that the naga tribes would have actually used rattan caning. So I ordered some on amazon fairly cheap

this is still with leather

 I matched the stainging on the teeth to match the pictures.

and return to the top to see the final result.