Dragon Skin tails

[melbel1023]

Ok, I know I'm probably opening up a can of worms here - but I want to make a silicone tail.
I've been wanting to forever now, and I feel like the time is coming up soon.

I'm in the last year of my college career, and it will be the last time I am really "financially secure" enough to make one.

But I don't know much about making silicone tails!
All I know is this
- I'm going to use Dragon Skin medium 10
- for my mold, i'm using gypsum with acrylic spray.

idk how to use dragon skin at all. i know, come july, i'm going to order a "sample" supply of it to test it out though.
how much dragon skin is needed to make a full length tail?
mine would probably be about 5 ft long, including the fluke (at the longest).

anyone got any ideas or suggestions to help me out here?

[AniaR]

they have a lot of tutorials on their website! Videos and everything. Why not buy a tester amount and see what you can do to practice and get the hang of it?

[Raina Matthews]

I've used dragon skin a bit on previous projects, personally I didn't like it much. Ended up being a lot harder and firmer than I had wanted. Ended up with another of their products though which worked out alot better.

As for how much, that of course depends on thickness. whilst it is stretchy, it can be easily punctured and torn. you'll want to make it somewhere in the realms of 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch thick I would imagine.

As other Raina mentioned, they do have trial sizes, for about $30, and I would highly recommend one of those. that'll give you the feel for how thick you want to make it etc.

One significant word of caution though. Use any form of colouring sparingly. one of their trial size packages needed a tiny tiny amount of colouring to give the colour tones I wanted. (and by tiny I'm taking smaller than pea size).

[Ilonka]

If you don't like the dragonskin monster makers latex is very good quality, I'm using it for my tail. It's much cheaper than silicone so its perfect for people with tight budgets. I would love to use dragonskin but its too pricy for me so I'm going to buy mould grade silicone which is actually really good. I bought some on eBay and I'm really happy with the product and it is better an the latex.

[Kanti]

I made a forum essentially dedicated to Dragonskin related questions: I hope it helps
http://mernetwork.com/index/showthread.php?2089-Full-Silicone-Tail-Tutorial-In-the-works

You're basically going to need to make a mold for everything. Dragonskin is too runny to work
with or sculpt so you need to just pour it into something.
Oil-based clay is a good sculpting medium and liquid plastic is generally a good idea for the
molds themselves.

[Ilonka]

I made my models out of oil based clay (monster clay) its very good and easy to work with and the best part is that its re usable. I made my moulds out of silicone and another with gesso. Gesso turned out good landinexpensive, bad thing is that its delicate if its put on too thin, so you need a few layers of it. You can find it in wallmart in rolls and in medical supply stores. Ad for the silicone or latex applying, you can either pur it into your mould or paint it on with a large brush, this requires several layers but you can creat cool textures when doing this technique.