How to Make Latex Skin

Video Transcript

"I'm Shaun O'Rorke with Eleven Bravo Productions and we are here at EUE Screen Gem Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina. The largest studio complex on the East Coast. Now I'm here with Molly Oleski and today we are going to talk about how to make latex skin. Well first of all you almost have to be a chemist to even make latex. So our suggestion is going to be to go to a party supply store or a special effects place that sells liquid latex online. Ok or go to a place where you can walk in physically pick it up, purchase it. Bring it back to wherever your shop is and your studio because we are going to teach you how to make a latex burn with liquid latex skin. Molly. Liquid latex skin you'd want to get a very thin latex often called theatrical latex. It's very thin meant to go on an actor's arm and do you know get your effect going. With lets say you are doing underneath your forearm, you have to decide if it is a first, second or third degree burn. Let's say it's a second degree where it's a lot of redness, peeling you know the white dieing skin. What you are going to do is first prep the skin, clean it, make sure it's clear and try not to get, you know, I know that everyone has hair but try to make sure that the actor is cool with you getting it all over their hair. And after that you stipple the latex on and what I try to do is though you have a solid area of covered latex skin. Try to slightly pattern it out so it matches the skin. After that, after it dries I do a couple of layers just to really thicken it up and show that it has you know depth there. After it dries and you powder it with translucent powder, even just baby powder you can just pick it off and make holes just like you know, skin that's just falling off you know the body from the extreme heat. After that I'd powder it again and you start putting on makeup. Now you can use just grease makeup, it's the easiest to work with latex. It doesn't really break latex down because there are certain types of makeup that break latex down. Any sort of, a lot of oil or alcohol deactivates latex and makes it breakdown. So I'd coat the area in red in like a capillary red. The type of red where you know someone slaps you in the face that's the color, that's the color that you are looking for. Now don't slap anybody in the face but that's what we are looking for. It's good reference. So after that I'd also underneath where the actual holes are I would paint it you know cut red. You know the red that you see in when, you know you cut yourself and you fall down and you ever had a big gash and the you know, the epidermis underneath the actual skin. So after that, I would actually also get either Vaseline or KY Jelly to get the wet look because that's the moisture coming out of your skin when you burn you know...that's gross....you know like the broken blisters. So that's a great little effect to use to get that, that burned painful look. Alright where there you go, we just showed you how to make a burn with latex skin."