Viggo Mortensen as Lord Aragorn from Lord of the Rings – life size silicone skinned portrait sculpture bust.
First thing to do was decide on the look and expression of the Aragorn sculpture. In this case, a strong intense glare. I then went about collecting photographic reference of him from various angles to work from. This enabled me to sculpt the head in water based clay and achieve a good likeness.
Over the next three weeks he was sculpted in water based clay over a steel armature. The clay sculpture was refined until I was happy, then the clay was sealed and moulded in fibreglass in sections. A translucent milky white silicone copy was cast, supported by a fibreglass understructure. This was then de-seamed and cleaned, then painted in several thin layers to obtain a skin like look using airbrushes and brushes. Individual hairs were next implanted for his scalp, eyebrows, lashes and beard by hand. He was given a haircut and the hair styled to give him the slightly wavey look from the movie. Lastly, acrylic eyes were custom made with hand painted irises and silk veins, before being inserted in to the head to give him his “intense” look I had envisioned.
