Fake Chicken Carcass

This prop was for a production of Miracle on South Division Street, at Peninsula Players Theatre in Door County, Wisconsin.
For the epilogue of the show, the characters are in the kitchen, and the script indicates that there are bits of cooking mess around to indicate the main character is in the middle of making soup. The director wanted a chicken carcass, draining in a colander, over the stock pot; as if she had just finished boiling the carcass for a homemade chicken stock.

Here is the carcass I made

And here is how I made it:

I started with a basic skeleton made from a couple pieces of lauan and dowel rods. I looked up some basic images of chicken skeletons to give me a basic guide. 

 Next I added a layer of Crayola model magic clay to give the chicken some meat and muscle. 

 Third, I soaked strips of muslin in elmers glue and wrapped them around parts of the chicken. The idea was that this would provide some different surfaces for the next, liquid latex step, to stick to. I am a little unsure of whether this step made any difference to the end product, or whether it could have skipped. 

Finally the chicken was coated with 6 coats of liquid latex (full disclosure, my intern, Ross, did this step while I was out shopping one day). 

 The latexed chicken was dusted with some Design Master, glossy wood tone spray, which, if you've read many posts on this blog, you know is the best way to give something that oven-baked look.

 Finally, I took a knife, and began to cut into the chicken, using my fingers to tear away at several of the cuts.

 Each cut exposed the layers underneath the latex skin,

 and slowly began to give them impression of a baked chicken, that had been picked clean of most of it's meat, and then boiled.