The Uncanny Valley: Crafting a White Walker: The Arms

Hair, Eyes, Clothes - Wearing and Final Notes

Items needed :

Pantyhose
Straight pins
Needle and thread
Liquid latex
Vaseline
Kleenex
White spray paint
Cheap super long nails
Nail clippers
Nail polish (or something that can prime the nails)
Black and white acrylic paint

Arms

From hose to gloves

I got this idea from someone who made a weeping angel costume:

I should have looked her tutorial up before doing it myself. One of the mistakes I made was that instead of cutting a hole for the neck, I cut the leg pieces completely off the stomach portion of the hose. This ended up allowing my shoulders to be exposed at times, even though the sleeves were attached above the shoulder.

Basically, turn the hose (or tights) inside out, pin them along the sides of your fingers, sew around your fingers, then cut between the stitches to make gloves. She used nail polish to cover the stitches to prevent runs. I used that at first, but ended up using latex, since I would be covering them with latex anyways. Use the nail polish/latex before you cut. It makes it a bit easier to deal with runs. Also, make sure to leave your fingers or some other similar spacer in the glove any time latex is drying. Otherwise, it will dry smaller.

Lube up

Now that you have your gloves, you can turn them right side out and put them on. But if you are going to start putting the latex on them, first cover your arm with a generous amount of vaseline, especially anywhere there is hair. It can be painful to detach the latex, but the vaseline will help immensely. You may want to consider shaving your arms. You seriously do not want the latex sticking to hair.

Adding the Texture

The arms were the most time consuming piece. The whole process is similar to paper mache, but instead of newspaper and glue, I use tissue and latex. They required a lot of "rework" to fix rips from putting them on and taking them off. I'll explain this more in a bit.

Take Kleenex and separate the sheets so they are 1-ply instead of two. Rip up the sheets so you have smaller pieces that do not have straight edges. The larger the piece is the more likely it will tear, but the more area it will cover.

A rip of 1-ply tissue:

Put latex on one side of the Kleenex and stick it to the glove while wearing it. If you have a cast of your arm to work off of, that will be easier. I didn't so I used my arm. If you do use a cast, make sure it's a material that latex will not stick to.

I recommend not doing the entire arm at once. Do a section. Let it dry. Whenever you finish a session of latexing, once the latex has completely dried, use baby powder (or talcum) to set the latex so it does not stick to itself. Move your arm into extreme positions. Bend the elbow a lot. Remove the glove. Put it back on. See if anything ripped.

Your arm varies in diameter, so you will need to test the glove and make sure your glove is stretchy where it needs to be stretchy. Break things early and often. When you replace the break spots in the tissue with latex, you increase the durability. It's very important to do this so you don't have unexpected tears on con day. I was not worried about my arms falling apart when it came time to wear them.

Wherever you put the tissue, the glove will no longer be stretchy there. I tried to keep an area on the underside that had no tissue so that it had space to expand when I put the gloves on.

Repair tissue as needed.

Any time you will be adding latex to an area that hasn't been covered yet, you will want to put vaseline on your skin first.

When I remake this I would like to have less overlap on the tissue. I think this will make the sleeves more flexible and easier to get on and off.

Color

I mixed water, acrylic paint, and latex together in an aluminum lined bowl. I did this twice. The first time I mixed some grey paint, and the second time I just used white.

The latex will create a yellowish texture by itself, so you'll want the paint.. Use a really cheap foam brush that you don't care about, or wad up a paper towel (this is what I did) and use that to dab the mixture onto your arm.

Anywhere the edge of the tissue is obvious use extra thick latex (no or very little added water).

I still wasn't happy with the whiteness, so I spray painted the arms with white spray paint.

To add more dark spots, especially between the tendons in the hands, I used the Bill Nye black paint. In the future I'd like to remake these with dark hose or tights instead of sheer underneath.

Overall, you will use a lot of latex.

Nails

For the nails, I bought some of those cheap super long nails.

The acrylic paint wouldn't stick, but nail polish would. I coated them with nail polish then used the black and white acrylic to color them.

To stick them to the gloves, have the gloves on, and make sure the area above your nail is completely covered in latex. You will be putting glue there, and you don't want any to stick to you. Having the gloves on helps you get the nail in the correct spot and helps you apply pressure from the opposite side.I used super glue to stick the nails on. This was a wee bit scary. You can probably also use acrylic glue if you wish.

I then put latex at the base of the nail so it looked like skin was covering them. When this latex dries, use the black and white acrylic paint to cover it.

Once the nails are on, you can cut them with nail clippers. I cut them shorter and also cut vertical breaks in them to make them look a bit ragged. After I cut them I put more black paint on the very tips, then used a paper towel to blend the black paint into the rest of the nail.

Here's a closer picture of the nails before I painted over the last bit of latex surrounding the nails.