Those who know me know that I love to Cosplay and that I’m a massive Star Wars Fan. It’s honestly a little ridiculous. I even spent much of the last year sitting in a chair having the ladies of Star Wars: Hera, Sabine and Ahsoka, tattooed onto my arm. It hurt but it’s absolutely gorgeous. (Quick plug for my incredible artist, @IsaacAguila at Bearcat Tattoo Gallery in Little Italy, San Diego.)

At any rate, I’ve always been interested in Star Trek but the sheer amount of available media was daunting, so I always put it off. Last year, with the encouragement of my Trekkie friends, I started exploring The Final Frontier(TM) and have since seen all of the available shows, fallen in love with several characters and fully embraced this alternate space fantasy into my own personal nerddom.

The ex-Borg, Seven of Nine, is one of many characters I immediately wanted to attempt to cosplay for this year’s Comic-Con. I decided on Seven’s character from Picard, because she’s a goddamn space pirate and how cool is that? Plus, the thought of trying to wrangle a blonde wig into a French twist to play Voyager’s Seven was not a fun one. The facial prosthetics were easy – 3D prints ordered through Etsy and touched up with paint and that was that. The hand prosthetic, however was a different story entirely.

Creating the Hand

I have no photos of my first failed attempt to paint liquid latex directly onto a nitrile glove while I wore it. That’s probably for the best. It looked like I was painting lines of cat vomit on my hand, all juicy, lumpy and yellow. Then, once it dried, darker yellow lines that cracked when I moved. Yeah, not fun to look at.

So I decided to instead make a plaster cast of my hand and add liquid latex to that instead. It was so much easier! I will never try to make a prosthetic without casting the body part first. Here’s a picture of the cast I made, as well as the first couple of layers of very thin/new liquid latex (don’t mind the D&D map background):

I followed the first layers with three more layers of older, thicker liquid latex in order to build it up.

After which I took a Xacto knife and trimmed the edges to make straighter lines and shaved it down to even it out. I alternated between adding more latex and shaving it down until I had something not exactly smooth but smooth enough.

It was looking pretty good, so I figured a few laters of paint and I’d be finished. I added two layers of silver acrylic paint mixed with the thinner latex but before it even dried I realized I’d jumped the gun. The metallic paint just made all of the irregularities stand out. It’s almost embarrassing how bad this looks.

One Step Forward: Two Steps Back

I was frustrated with my progress but determined to keep going. Even if I had to start over, at least I’d know what didn’t work.

I decided to paint the whole thing with some Plasti-Dip, figuring that it was thick enough it might help fill in and smooth out some of the rough edges. Here’s what that stage looked like (with pics of the shading I did on the facial prosthetics while waiting for things to dry):

After the Plasti-Dip and another round of razor blade fine-tuning, I added three more layers of acrylic silver paint mixed with liquid latex. I wouldn’t have added so many layers but I had to keep doing it until the color was right. Then I peeled it off the form, trimmed the extra bits with nail scissors and tried it on for the first time.

For SDCC, I adhered the prosthetic to my skin with spirit gum and I think it held rather well, considering the temps were in the mid-80’s with 80% humidity. Here’s the finished product:

For my first foray into making a complicated prosthetic, I think it looks pretty good! How do you think it turned out?

Next up: Seven of Nine’s jacket