The Mad Lab

Hello everyone,

with this months SEI a first aid kit or anything therein, I immediately thought of a "contaminated" first aid kit. My design was heavily influenced by movies like John Carpenter's "The Thing" and the game "Dead Space."

I started with a cheap first aid kit

I dumped all the band-aides and trial pouches of tylenol and started building up organic-looking shapes with cotton and mold-making latex.

While waiting for that to dry I rolled a few eyes from clay and picked some teeth that I thought I could incorperate into the design. During further build up of the inside of the kit, I built cavities for the eyes.

I then began to paint it. The first coat (pictured) was a base coat of red. I kind of liked how the natural latex + cotton showed through, but it was too bright. I put on another coat of darker red, then used a brown wash to fill in the crevices.

After everything was dry, I painted and glazed the eyes and teeth. I inserted them, with a small amount of hot glue to keep them in place. I tucked back in bits of gauze, and some of the band-aides that were in it. I put a similar looking buildup on an empty food coloring bottle to make it look more like real stuff was in the kit.