Hooray, We're In The Studio! I Spent The Better Part Of My Sunday Listening To The Beatles And Coating

Hooray, we're in the studio! I spent the better part of my Sunday listening to the Beatles and coating a headless, eight-year-old boy in Vaseline. See?

Because of all the time I spent unpacking the 8,000 boxes of puppet-making supplies we ordered from Burman, I didn't get as much done today as I would have liked. But I did make the first half of the boy body mold (this week I'll finish the mold and hopefully pour some latex before the weekend), and that's a start.

Here he is after a layer of hydrocal:

And after the first half of the mold is complete:

The west side of the studio, just for kicks:

Zzzzzzzzz...

It's 2am and I'm still not done for the night. But that's ok, just a few more days and all this will be over. Shooting starts on Saturday morning, bright and early, which means it would be nice if...oh, I don't know...my puppets actually had heads by then.

Because they don't.

So I spent 6:30-1:30 at the studio, patching and painting the puppets. I finished three of the nine completely, two more just need heads (a minor detail), and the other four need one more coat of paint before they catch up to their headless brethren. Which means that now, I'm going to sit here and catch up on House while I sculpt a half-dozen heads as fast as my little hands can go.

Oh, and here's Marion and Monster #1 for my mom, because I promised a picture days ago but didn't finish until now:

I admit, these posts are getting fewer and farther between. But I haven't abandoned you entirely!

Here's a frog prince (or is he a baron?), modeled after this statue in Philadelphia. I'm quite a fan of his jaunty crown, personally.

Here is in in profile:

Super Sculpey, ~60 min.

Yikes, that was a long hiatus. Hopefully the fact that I forced myself back on track excuses today's poor showing. This little flamingo wasn't exactly inspired (or stable...hence the precarious angle), but he is color-appropriate. Maybe that counts for something?

Super Sculpey, ~30 min. 

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. 

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. :)