Make: Prop Skull

You know those days where you’re noodling about what you might make and it occurs to you that you don’t have a full-sized human skull and somehow that surprises you? It surprised me. So I made one.

I poked around a bit and found a model that was sufficiently detailed. I found one on Thingiverse here:

Now this model was called a “mini skull” and it only measured 65mm wide. Next I needed to determine the average width of a human skull and ended landing on 145mm:

Two things:

• I do think 145mm was a bit large. The resultant skull feels a bit large. But, I have a head like a bucket, so maybe it’s me-sized, maybe it’s a bit large.
• My apologies if anyone besides me has to try and explain my Google Search history.

Next I printed the pieces that made up the model:

Next I fused the two halves with epoxy resin and began to fill obvious issue (layer lines) with putty and then eventually I used a filling primer to help.

After that I started painting. I started with off-white kind of bone color, added lots of layers and then started adding some grit and grime as well as some light dry-brushing to highlight some of the high points so there was a range from light on the top edges to dark in the recesses. I did kick up the white on the teeth because that felt right. The goal was to look like something both aged and found. The result was a bit more white/grey than brown-ish aged bone that I was going for, but I eventually decided to call it good.