Monday, September 23, 2013

Faux Snakeskin

It's turning into bubble wrap week around here.

Yesterday I stumbled onto a way to make amazingly realistic snakeskins.  Take some small package bubble wrap, the kind with bubbles around 1/4 of an inch in size.  Place it bubble side up on a sheet of glass.  Hit with a heat gun on high.  Tada!  A cast off snakeskin.

Sadly, the occasions when you need some faux snakeskin are few and far between.  I did think of two applications this would be useful for.  The first is a gigantic snakeskin for a cryptozoology display.  Roll out some bubble wrap, trim it roughly to the elongated V-shape of a real snakeskin, and hit it with the heat gun.   During the meltdown process it seems to shrink about 60%, so you'll need a pretty long run of the stuff to make an impressive trophy specimen.

The second use would be as a surface treatment for the tail of a Fiji Mermaid style gaff.  If you could shrink the bubble wrap around the tail structure you would get an excellent fish-like scale pattern.

1 comment:

CoastConFan said...

What a great discovery! Thanks for sharing Propnomicon. If you make sheets of faux snakeskin you can make a mask from the product. It can be either a full hood or just a face mask for costuming LARPS or Halloween. Also you can use the material for accents on costumes such as on vests, gantlets & etc. The fact that it is flexible can work in your favor.

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