The Naked Silo

Like many of my other unusual projects (like  all   my   cooking   stuff , my  pirate sword , and  Small Pond 's first  barn quilt ), I figured the new jetpack for my Pilot stilting costume (to replace my first jetpack built for the 2014 Firelight Lantern Festival ) would also be undertaken by the  Special Projects Division . But, this fall, I'll be getting involved in some highly unusual projects (dealing with Small Pond airborne mythology, alternate realities, and a few personal builds) that will all be realized through various scale models and dioramas. Yup: I'm getting back into model-making after a hiatus of about 15 years. So I've created the  Small Pond Shipyard  (with fancy logo and slogan) to deal with these creations and, since the new jetpack is flight-related, it makes sense that it would be the Shipyard's first assignment. The Special Projects Division is still active, with at least two new projects alr...

fig. 17. Casey applies for a job with Blue Man Group while Punch looks on. I mentioned near the end of Part One that Krista was most likely making the second Casey head for nefarious purposes...and I was right. Not satisfied with making a second Casey head from my sculpt, Krista has sculpted her own Punch and has now cloned FIVE of them in paper maché (only one of which is pictured above). She's currently working on multiple Judy heads (you can see the design in her sketchbook behind Punch). Kidding aside, these are just the base colours of the heads; they'll look different when they're done...although I still suspect nefarious intentions regarding Casey: Krista mentioned something about a Gollum puppet... ---------------------------------------------------- UPDATE, 12 December 2010: Krista finished her Dark Casey quite a while ago, but I've finally blogged about him here . Enjoy!

fig. 8. Sunburned Casey. I decided to use a dark colour for the base coat of acrylic paint (the same way I would use a dark colour for the underpainting of my oil paintings as a nice primer) even though this probably would be covered up entirely by successive layers of lighter Caucasian skin tones to match the original puppet. fig. 9. Head and hands with final skin paint colour. Here’s the final skin tone for Casey after several coats/attempts at matching the original puppet. It’s still not a perfect match, but it’s good enough for this project --successive gene splicing experimentation will eventually yield better replicants. fig. 10. Painted facial features and details. I used the opposite end of the brush to make the tiny dots of Casey’s freckles since I didn't have a fine-tipped brush at the time of painting. In fact there are some unfortunate smudges made by the not-so-fine brush I had to use for the fine detail work (my better bru...

This year, a friend of ours invited us to a Halloween party with a Can-con ( Canadian content ) theme and Krista almost immediately decided to (not dress up as, but) replicate the Finnegan puppet from CBC’s long-running and beloved kid’s show, Mr. Dressup as designed by puppeteer Judith Lawrence . I thought that was a great idea and, after seeing her make one excellent puppet after another, I knew she’d do a great job (and she did). I mentally entertained the notion of building the Casey puppet from the same show for about ten seconds before dismissing the idea on the grounds that I had never sculpted a puppet before and there didn’t seem to be enough time for me to fumble my way through something new. After a few days Krista suggested I make Casey. Since I still hadn’t thought of a good Can-con person or thing to go as, and trusting that she’d guide me through it (and make the costume!), I decided to go for it. What follows isn't so much a tutorial as it is a document of My Firs...