Making Tentacles: Creating lekku from scratch

As I wanted my headtails to have a genuine tentacle feel to them as well as being able to move naturally, I opted for foam rubber as the base material. Huge chunks of the stuff, to be precise. Here's one half-block with the outline of the horn sketched on and the bit where my head goes already hollowed out.

This is how long the pieces were - about 4ft. As you can see, I'd already nicked my thumb with the carpet knife I used for carving!

Many spatial conundrums and patient chipping and snipping later, this is one half of the head. The tentacle on the right is quite soft, as you can see from how it flops about my sofa. I added another 10 inches of tentacle to the bottom to make up the proper length of Shaak Ti's headtails.

Snapshot of the tools used, and the carnage that ensued.

The two halves of the head, waiting to be glued together.

The finished foam rubber base. Yes it was Christmas at the time, and the 12" Qui-Gon on the table is waiting to be turned into a Roman officer. Just so you know. :)

Next, we need skin. To this end, I've covered the squishy and porous foam rubber in elastic polyester fabric. Not too elastic thogh, as I wanted to keep wrinkling to a minimum. The material I used is sold as 'semi-elastic coat lining', feels awful but makes for a very nice alien skin base. Here, one side of the head is already covered while the other is still naked. Also, I've added a rubber strap as the whole arrangement would simply slide off the back of the head without it. I assume the original Shaak Ti head was probably glued to the actress's skullcap... in my version, the strap gets painted to blend into the facial make-up and is almost invisible but makes the head very comfortable to wear.

Pinning the fabric in place.

The edges of the skin-base fabric are sewn into the foam rubber with a curved upholsterer's needle...

...while the side seams along the tentacles and horns are simply done with an ordinary one.

A very shiny Shaak Ti head.

Next, for the genuine alien-skin feel, two layers of liquid latex (available from theatre/make-up suppliers, or if you're desperate and rich, from sex shops too) are applied with a sponge. At this point, I had to make sure I caught all stray drops since I didn't want my Shaak Ti to look like she had zits.

As the liquid latex dries, it turns a very unappealing yellowish beige, so I sprayed the whole thing white again using matte model spray paint.

Then comes the colourful bit: two coats of black and grey model paint (Tamiya's is wonderful), the first coat applied with a sponge to make the edges fuzzy and natural-looking, and the second with a brush to achieve a deeper and more even colouring for the stripes. If you've got an airbrush, that'd be perfect of course, but I haven't :)

The finished head, drying atop a broomstick and getting attacked by a miniature Hallmark Qui-Gon dangling from my chandelier.