Plastic Skeleton Corpsing -- with Plastic

It's become a tried and true method of getting a quick corpsed look on a Walgreens skeleton: wrap the bones in plastic shopping bags or sheeting and melt with a heat gun. The results are a convincing rotting corpse once its stained or painted.

Although Allen Hopps probably popularized the technique the most with one of his old YouTube Wednesday shows, I recall someone several years before on HauntForum or Halloween Forum using plastic shopping bags. I had never tried it using that method, though I did use Allen's method once. But for the half-skeleton I'm using to hang on the crucifix in the church, I wanted a quick and dirty  method of corpsing, and that's what I turned to to complete it: plastic skeleton corpsing using plastic shopping bags.

Home-Made Plastic

I'll be thinking about how I can use this more in the future for prop building, but I came across a video -- and a few sites that experimented with the recipe -- on how to make home-made, biodegradable plastic from common household ingredients.


The blog Shapeways did some experiments at home and while finding it a gee-whiz type of science project, was disappointed to see how the results came out when using molds. In particular, the plastic shrunk and deformed to varying degrees. 

In the comments section it was suggested that sheets of plastic could be made, allowed to dry (and shrink/deform), and then reheated and shaped as necessary.

The first thing that popped into my mind was using the plastic to craft skulls, masks, and props. It seems like it could be a great help in making a mold that could be used over and over again. Obviously the great benefit is in the relative low cost and ease of access to the ingredients. While the blogs I visited that discussed the process talked a lot about using laser etching and 3-D printers to create stuff, um, I don't have ready access to that. I imagine running this plastic through my inkjet printer won't accomplish much other than making a mess.

Still, it seems worthwhile experimenting with the process and I'll post my results in the future. For now, here's the recipe:

7 parts water
1 part vinegar
1/2 part glycerine (no, that's not the stuff you make dynamite out of)
1-1/2 parts starch

Heat in a pan for several minutes and apparently this creates a thick substance with a glue-like consistency that you can spread out to make sheets. Seems it can take up to a day (or more) to dry and harden depending on the thickness.

According to the Shapeways post, a recipe of 8 parts water, 1 part vinegar, 1 part gycerine, and 1-1/2 parts starch worked best for filling molds and was much easier to work with.


I'm not sure how effective this will ultimately be, but it certainly seems worth trying. I hope some other haunters pick this up who are more technically and scientifically advanced than I am and can improve upon the process.


Rich