Today Was Excellent Day, Thanks Mostly To My Personal Assistant (and Best Friend), Dayna. She Was A Huge

Today was excellent day, thanks mostly to my personal assistant (and best friend), Dayna. She was a huge help, not just for making my armatures and cutting up burlap, but for keeping me company and generally being awesome. Thanks!

And then Merci stopped by! It was a regular film-making party up in there today. Here's Dayna (right) and Merci measuring a tiny doorway for the set:

While they slaved away on that, I tried to figure out how to make the characters' heads. Cast them in latex? Stick with the Super Sculpey? I finally decided to go with the latter, so I hollowed out this head to prepare it for baking:

Once that was done, I hollowed out the eye sockets so we could pop in the eyeballs (harvested, like the clothes and wigs, from a bunch of dolls I bought at Target):

And then we popped in the eyeballs for the creepiest moment of the day (see above).

Not bad for a day's work.

Still plugging away at the first models for the film project. Here, you can see rough versions of the "young boy" body (to be used for some schoolkids in the background), a couple of heads (we'll see what works after we cast them in latex, starting tomorrow), and "sketches" of the monsters. The pear-shaped one on the right is really growing on me, but the cat/walrus/Reptar hybrid on the left has got to go. I'll keep fussing until something sticks. It's hard to know exactly what's going to work, since the bodies will be clothed (real fabric) and the monsters will have fur. It's like trying to sculpt the skinned version of something you can't quite picture in the first place.

Thanks for sticking with me while I do the boring parts. After tomorrow, there's going to be a lot of cool stuff to see. :)

I call this one "Second Attempt at a Human Head: This Time (Please, Lord) Let My Friends Make Less Fun of Me."

Skulls are hard, you guys! I'm trying to get the fundamentals down so I can sculpt more realistic figures (you gotta know what's underneath first, right?), but people just got too many bones. I'll keep at it, though. Eventually I will be a skeleton-sculpting pro, which I guess will come in handy in my future career as either a medical supply stockist or a Hot Topic employee.

Super Sculpey, ~60 min.

Woo! Lots done yesterday. I made the very last of the puppets (Monster #2, above) and started the epic trim/patch/paint process for the remaining eight puppets. I took the night off tonight to see my friend Colin who was visiting from out of town, but rest assured that I have no plans to see the sunlight tomorrow at all.

And now the back! I tell you what, this first mold is kicking my butt. Which is coincidentally what we can see in this picture: the generic boy body from the rear. This is the second half of the mold (in progress in this photo, but finished as of tonight), and tomorrow I'm going back to see if the last week's worth of effort actually left me with a usable mold. If so, I finally get to pour the latex! If I'm really lucky, I'll even have a fully finished, painted, jointed, and dressed little boy to show for myself by the end of the day.

If not, there will probably a lot of tears. Maybe I'll even make it an audio post. 

There were three things John Watson loved in this world: a good pipe, Sherlock Holmes, and their bull-pup Gladstone.

Super Sculpey, ~30 min.