Pros-Aide I Adhesive (1 oz)

Product Information

Heat and moisture build up behind an appliance can reduce the effectiveness of a glue. Pros Aide can kind of melt away if there is enough sweat, and I have mopped up many bubbles of milky perspiration from bubbles forming under appliances. The transfers are made of, well, GLUE! And they are very robust, tenacious, and don’t come off till you want them to. I’ve had them covered in the kind of stuff that normally eats prosthetics for breakfast and they hung in there.

So lets start settling the mind by establishing a basic point – there are essentially two types of glue used with prosthetics. These are:

Prepping for Application

Pros-Aide® is the base for PAX Paint™– a combination of water-based colors with Pros-Aide®. PAX Paint™ is a flexible color with high bond strengths used for the skin and many surfaces.

THE MOULD: Both use silicone moulds. Obviously we need to use a platinum silicone for the GFAs as we will be using a platinum silicone to make the pieces (PlatSil Gel-10 with Smith’s Deadener. For transfers you can use a tin silicone mould. Patch testing small amounts in advance can help flag these issues up before you start slapping it all over, giving you time to modify your approach and keep everyone happier. If you put silicone over wet silicone adhesives, the liquid solvent can’t evaporate and is held against the skin, not drying.

Prep the Skin & Position the Transfer

use the transfer paper and acetate technique. As has been seen recently on this group, it is also possible to apply prosaide appliances directly from a flat mould in the same way as is often done with encapsulated silicone appliances, in which case the freezing step is totally unnecessary. A good skin cleanser and moisturiser work well as a final flourish to help skin recover from a days prosthetic makeup wear. Most prosthetic glue removers have some kind of oil content, and this greasy film can be removed afterwards using a cleanser or from simply washing the skin as normal. These bubbles are not the same as those introduced in the mix by overbeating, and it is unlikely that the issue is actually purely overheating either, as the temperatures used are too low. It appears to be most likely that the precise mechanism by which they form is due to a combination of excessive water remaining in the mix PLUS using accelerated drying. Either of these factors on their own would not seem to be an insurmaountable issue, but when they combine, the components in the chemical formulation of the adhesive appear to be negatively affected by too-rapid drying times. Uneven contraction of the various components of the mix results in proper cross-linking failing to occur evenly throughout the piece, and we observe imperfections forming.

Professional prosthetic makeup artist Meg Wilbur explains special effects makeup in 11 levels of difficulty, from easy to complex. Special effects makeup is a really broad category, so Meg defines complexity as increasingly elaborate flourishes, texture and detail in her work. Meg goes over everything from temporary tattoos to prosthetic face applications and dry-brushing. There are two types of appliances that have come into widespread use over the last few years. Firstly, the GFA or ESA, (which stands for Gel-filled Appliance or Encapsulated Silicone Appliance), and secondly the Pros-Aide Transfer, (sometimes referred to as Tinsley Transfers after one of the early developers of the technique). The developers of these techniques were seeking what was once thought impossible: appliances that would be both practically invisible on close examination, to stand up to the high quality cameras of today, whilst also being robust enough to stand up to the rigours of water, mud, blood, sweat and action filming. Bonus: It was written with Todd Debreceni, author of Special Makeup Effects for Stage and Screen: Making and Applying Prosthetics . AdhesivesThat’s enough to cover tons of applications, so that one bottle can last someone like me many, many months. Foam has a tendency to swell and distort with removers too, so often it helps to tear off large unattached sections especially if they flop about and get in the way. Everyone will have their own selection of preferred materials, but here’s some of the teams at Mouldlife. To paraphrase Lance the drug dealer in Pulp Fiction, “That stuff costs more, but when you use it, you will know where that money went!