First I covered her face with a slow-setting form of alginate. (Alginate is the stuff your dentist uses to make impressions of your teeth.)

Careful - don't cover up the breathing apparatus.

When the alginate set I covered it with plaster bandages. This gave it a supporting shell.

Victoria was kind of nervous about the whole lifecasting process. I wonder...

• Should I have faced her the other way so she wasn't looking at the unnerving masks on the wall?
• Did the utterly unintelligent expression on my face reduce her confidence that I could do this without suffocating her?

At this point, the lifecast mold is complete. After removing it it from Victoria's face, I immediately filled it with plaster. Alginate is is extremely delicate and starts shrinking right away, which renders it useless. Once the plaster set, I made a similar mold of the plaster positive using the same process, except I used silicone instead of alginate.

This is the finished sculpture. As it turned out, the lifecast wasn't as helpful as I had hoped it would be. I can count on one hand the number of lifecasts I've done, and I did half of them during the Reagan administration. (But I knew better than to tell Victoria and David that.)

So I'm not the best lifecaster out there. As a result, the lifecast molds weren't as accurate as they could have been. Specifically, I think they were too heavy. The molds pulled down the castee's face, adding jowls and the like. This made the casts look about 20 years older than the subjects.
Not good.

But on the positive side, it provided a place to start that was better than if I hadn't made the casts at all.