Kaa

Kaa was a gift I gave to Eric Thomas, for Christmas I think. Unlike my other sculpts, this one relied on a good armature. Kaa is just one big tube with an armature through his entire body.

Originally, I had started sculpting Kaa in the typical "coiled-up-pile-of-snake" pose with his head coiling out. But I started over because it wasn't interesting enough. I decided to try and sculpt that awesome moment in "Jungle Book" when he hustles off with that trippy animation! I couldn't remember ever seeing any toys or sculptures of him all spread out, so I tried it.

Complete with a knot in his tail.

Kaa was really fun to figure out. But- simple as he is, being simply a long tube with an attitude, this sculpt really taught me that a great sculpture should look cool and interesting from any and every angle! I wish I had more pics of him but I didn't have a good camera at the time. He turned out really nice.

I couldn't resist painting this one though. Eric is a great artist and would have done an awesome job if I would've given him Kaa with just in primer-grey... but I wanted to do it.

I sketched his spot pattern and his underbelly on the primer-coat with a soft pencil. After the primary colors were done, I flat coated the whole thing with dull-coat to protect the first paint layer, in case I screwed something up. The lines on his underside were simply drawn on with a prismacolor pencil, then I dull-coated him again. He had this satin sheen to him that looked really cool. Finally, I finished his eyes over with a gloss coat to make them shiny.

"Ohhhhh... my sssssinusssssss...!"

Would you trust him?

Boba Fett costume

This is my Boba Fett costume I made as a surprise for Halloween the year of 1993 (wow) I believe. All of it was hand-made and scratch built in my one-bedroom apartment in North Hollywood. Now this was before the Internet, before DVDs (WHAT?), before you could buy a full costume from some guy sellin 'em. The whole thing was built from nothing! Which is why there is no rocket-pack... for alas- I ran out of time!

The helmet was sculpted in front of my laser disc player in pause mode. "Return of the Jedi" was my main reference, along with pictures from books and trading cards I had. Eric(Thomas) helped me make a plaster "cast" of my head and I sculpted the helmet on top of it with green plasticine (I think) clay. I figured this would be the safest way to make sure that it fit on my head.

When the helmet sculpt was done- I needed help. A friend arranged for another friend of his to help me mold and cast the helmet. I need to buy everything and just bring it to his shop. I had to ask one of my friends to help me get it there. I wanted to surprise everyone at Simpsons with it so no one would know who it was until I took off the helmet, but I had to let someone in on it. Paul Wee and I had kind of talked about how cool it would be to "make-this-or-dress-up-as-that" for Halloween and once we were thinking how tough (but awesome) it would be to make a Boba Fett costume. When I told Paul what I had in my apartment and why I needed his help he nearly fell over. So at lunch one day we drove to my apartment and with Paul holding this green Fett helmet thing in his lap, off we went! When we got there, the guy thought we dropped it because of the "dent" on top. Right on!

The cast was made in a creamy brown fiberglass so it looked like it was made out of chocolate! I filled in any pits and air bubbles with epoxy putty and finished the helmet with lots of sanding and rebuilding. It was really fun to paint it in the flat colors and then mess it up with scrapes and chips and stuff. The macroscope ratchets down over the front and was built from the leg of a Transformer toy I found in an old toy box from home in North Dakota!

The armor and gauntlets and stuff were built and formed out of styrene sheets, cut and fitted together. Lots of Velcro and hot glue anchored it in place on the cloth uniform, which was made by a friend of my Mom's back home who happens to be a seamstress. She did a great job!

Now (of course) you can find unlimited reference for Boba but back then it was hard to find really detailed pics of all his gadgets and his paint schemes and stuff. I think I got pretty close.

Everybody at worked loved it! Paul was inspired with the styrene sheets approach that he borrowed my heat-gun and made his own armor and came as a Colonial Marine from "Aliens"!
Eric was working at Universal ( I think he was just starting designs on the Popeye ride in Orlando), so I drove over at lunch to show him. This is where the pics of me in the full outfit (sans rocket-pack) were taken. Eric was dressed in full-on Pirate mode that year.

That year I didn't win anything in the costume contest back at Simpsons... Pete Michaels beat everybody! He dressed up as a trashy hoochie-girl. Can't beat that! (He looked so HOT...!) It was fun getting big reactions at all the parties that year. Good times!

Bruce

Bruce was the first sculpture I did from a drawing. I'd played around with kiln-fired ceramic clays in high school, but never sculpted with super sculpey before. I had drawn this picture of Bruce while I was between scenes on Simpsons my first year of doing layout. My friend Eric Thomas really liked the big toothy grin he had and said it would be cool to see that in three dimensions! He asked if I had ever sculpted and I said not really. So he dared me to do it. I accepted.










































Bruce doesn't have an armature or anything like that. He was my first one and I didn't really know what I was doing, so he is solid scupley. I used a pencil as a brace to support his big head. However, little did I know that sculpey gets softer when you bake it and THEN gets hard. His head came off the first time I baked him.


























So I fixed his head and re-baked him, using an old shoelace tied to the oven rack to keep his head in place while he cooked. I started leaving the sculpture in the oven after turning off the heat and letting it cool down real slow so it wouldn't crack or fissure so much from cooling down so fast.


















It was challenging to make the sculpt look exactly like the drawing from that one angle and keep the whole thing working with everything else at the same time. But that's the trick isn't it!? A good sculpt works at ANY and EVERY angle.






























Bruce was alot of fun. Eric had told me that sculpting would help my drawings look more solid, and he was right. I started thinking beyond the flat sketching and really dimesionalized how shapes and forms worked together now that I had done something 3D instead of just 2D. I gave Bruce a little tatt and a band-aid just to be stupid. For the longest time he was just painted with flat grey primer. When I wanted to enter him in the employee art show at Film Roman one year, I gave him his speckled blue paint scheme. I think it worked well. Keep on smilin'!!