One Fabulous Moustache (+ a cane and a hat)

3 more from the last couple days. Including one fabulous moustache. These are kinda straddling the line between sketches & finished work. Well, sloppy finished work.

work sketches

another couple of work sketches, from yesterday.

unfinished project #23

I am a massive fan of the film Blade Runner. In terms of overall visual style, it is breathtaking. And the gun wielded by Harrison Ford is a thing of clunky beauty.

Now, there are several companies/individuals who sell prop replicas of this piece. Most of them are really high quality; parts cast from the same guns used to make the prop for the film, etc. (and the hero, full-detail version of the pistol was just rediscovered by the prop-nerd public a couple years ago, leading to another round of even-more-accurate replicas). Unfortunately, replicas cost money.

Since I am, if nothing else, a crafty nerd, I opted to make one of my own. The shots above are how it stood as of late 2007. I made mine a bit bigger than the original - I wanted something solid, that feels good in the hand. I was/am much more concerned about trying to get the feel of it, as opposed to strict accuracy to what was on-screen. There are folks who can do accurate amazingly well, I'm just not one of them.

Shots below are as of late 2008 - a lot more sculpting work done. Of course, still a long way to go...

Build Materials: PVC pipe, ApoxySculpt, wood, Styrene of various sorts, brass plumbing fittings, cast-off bits o' plastic. Also of note: the only power tools I have are a Dremel, and a small belt sander. Everything else is done by hand.

Painting circa 2006

This is the first real painting I ever finished. It's hanging in my living room now, actually - it's extremely rare for me to finish something and not hate it. That's actually part of why I'm putting all these things on Ye Olde Blog; it's an attempt to make myself look at this body of work more as a whole, not as individual pieces that I'm not proud of.

So anyway, this is from a photo I found of Zoetica Ebb on Flickr, right around the time I first discovered the site. At the time I had no clue who Miss Ebb was, other than a painfully striking model with a very peculiar(read: Amazing!) fashion sense. She's one of the founders of Coilhouse, she had a weekly column on SG (What's Zo Wearing?), and is also an artist and photographer.

It is possible I have a crush.

unfinished project #78

This was my slightly-damaged base sculpture for a planned Demon-headed lightswitch cover, to be cast in plastic. Built to fit over a real lightswitch cover, so as to avoid any hazards by way of electricity-meets-meltable-substance-not-designed-to-go-near-electricity.

I got as far as starting to make the molds for this, but then discovered that the silicone I was using was a different formula than I thought it was/was familiar with...the mold halves stuck together terribly. After much tension and trying to cut it out of the mold, I put it in a box and forgot about it. I still have it, somewhere, still trapped in (by now) crappy, useless silicone rubber.

Warning!: Obviously Fake Severed Heads

I made two severed heads (and a miscellaneous hand)for Gamut Theatre's production of Titus Andronicus a couple years ago. Massively stressful (I was working with materials and techniques that I had read about but never actually used before).

The basic method was taking lifecasts of the actors' faces, building up the back of the head & the ears with clay, making a two-part Ultracal mold of the complete head, pouring in casting latex, letting the latex cure a bit, then filling the hollow casting with an expanding foam before pulling the cast heads out of the mold.

All this made more hilarious by a truly terrible application of (almost) blood-colored paint, and the fact that the expanding foam that was used was really squishy and flexible after curing. In essence, Nerf-Heads.

But I will say this: seen from a darkened stage, they were creepy. And recognizable as the characters. Good times!

Time for the Old

Sheesh, these are two really old drawings...the one on the left is from '96, maybe? A drawing of Fairuza Balk from some magazine of the time. The one on the right is from '94, drawn from the back cover of the very first tattoo magazine that I ever purchased. That drawing was actually the first time that I ever used chalk/charcoal on a black surface. Aahh, college.

The trip down memory lane will continue throughout this evening. You have been warned.

Ladies and Germs...

So Jen and I were hired by a local ad agency to make some foam costumes, in a rather tight timeframe. Had a blast, it was a highly entertaining project. I didn't even freak out until the last day, when the sheer mass of "things we didn't have time to finish" started pushing me under. But it's cool.

Honestly, folks, how often do you get invited to make foam germ costumes?! Not often enough, I'll wager.

Ad campaign here.