McTodd Caricatures!

B3tatastic!

2011-12-08T04:35:00.000-08:00

B3ta (pronounced 'beta') is a marvellous website for wastrels to post silly stories, anecdotes and craft daft photoshopped (and other) images and animations. My first foray as an adult into sculpting caricatures was actually for a b3ta competition, when I made my Patrick Moore bust (detailed in an early bolg post after I'd upgraded the eyes).

Recently, they had an Amazing Projects thread, to which I contributed a picture of Puppet Nick Griffin, and thereby got a mention in their newsletter! Not by name but by project: b3ta Newsletter 506

Which was nice!

And as a special treat, here's a bigger version of the b3ta image, with Puppet Nick looking suitably patriotic, the twat...

I'm also on the verge of completing a caricature bust of a friend's dad, from which I'll be making a mould and then a resin-bronze casting, to give the effect of a quality cast bronze piece. More on that later...

Biddley biddley bong!

2011-10-12T03:35:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a long time since I last posted. Partly this is due to some demoralisation on my part because the final Hitchcock sculpture/puppet turned out shite, a massive disappointment.

To cheer myself up, I dressed up Nick Griffin:

Alfred Hitchcock: Part 4

2010-08-18T00:29:00.000-07:00

Little progress - I've been incredibly busy at work recently, which has taken it out of me - so I've just been tweaking and improving it, and this, I think, is pretty much the final result:

This weekend I'll make the mould...

Alfred Hitchcock: Part 3

2010-08-11T18:37:00.000-07:00

Good news - the McGuffins are happy with the sculpt! I plan to build a full body to go with the head, and exhibit it at a McGuffin's event in September, so watch this space...

On the other hand, this Hitchcock sculpt is proving harder than I'd originally thought. You would think, "Alfred Hitchcock - piece of piss." But no - it's very easy to end up with a sort of Generic Fat Bloke, which is what I felt I had in my previous post. So, a few days of faffing about, and this is where I am - I feel it now really captures the essence of Hitchcock, as it were...

Tomorrow I shall refine it, add some minor, but important, detailing, and get on with mouldmaking. Later, I'll show what those holes in the eyeball blanks are for.

Alfred Hitchcock: Part 2

2010-08-07T08:08:00.001-07:00

Slightly behind schedule, I had hoped to have completed it by today in time for the McGuffin's quiz, but I've only (almost) completed the sculpting of the master, so here it is:

Just need to add some fine details, such as brow furrows and eyebrows and tomorrow I can get on with making the mould (which I shan't cover in detail as it will be almost exactly the same process as for the Nick Griffin puppet, with one exception which I will cover in due course).

Alfred Hitchcock: Part 1

2010-07-31T12:41:00.000-07:00

My new project is Alfred Hitchcock, which I hope can be used by a local (Waltham Forest based) compaign group the McGuffins, who are campaigning to get the derelict local EMD Cinema, bought several years ago by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), restored as a cinema for the community. The McGuffins are called thus because 'McGuffin' was Alfred Hitchcock's term for the desired object around which any plot revolves, motivating the characters into action, and Alfred Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone in... Waltham Forest! Waltham Forest is, ironically given the connection to one of British cinema's greatest directors, one of the two London boroughs not to have a cinema, hence the interest in rejuvenating the EMD, for both practical and heritage reasons.

The puppet will be made in much the same way as Nick Griffin was, so I shan't cover it in the same depth, but as a departure I have first made a smaller scale maquette (from Super Sculpey) which has helped enormously to get an idea of the basic shapes and proportions. I will scale this up around 50% or so to sculpt the fullsize version from plasticine.

Here's the maquette:

Nasty Nick Part 6: Coloured

2010-07-08T17:52:00.001-07:00

Ooh, he wouldn't like that, our Nick, being described as 'coloured' but, if you're reading this, fear not my bargain-bin would-be Aryan, I refer merely to your puppet avatar being painted!

There are new, more convincingly-proportioned irises in the eyes, courtesy of my old mucker Al. The jawline, upper lips and jowls were painted with more artists' acrylics, the skin tone I used earlier was mixed with a little extra brown to darken it a tad and some blue to give it a grey cast, suggestive of a mild five-o-clock shadow. The cheeks and nose were lightly dusted with modelmakers' acrylics to give a rosy cast; this both breaks up the facial colours, and helps bring out the nose especially, which was prone before to disappearing against the the background of the rest of the face. You can see the importance of these steps if you scroll right to the bottom of this page, in a photo showing the cast head with it's base tinted skin juxtaposed with the final item.

This is not a realistic way of painting a face - anyone looking for hints and tips on painting realistically (for, say, prosthetic appliances) will be making a big mistake reading this blog! But, having studied the superlative Spitting Image, I realised that for these types of figures, a stylised look is what is needed. It's all about creating an effect rather than realism.

And so, for example, the insides of the nostrils and mouth were painted near-black, to accentuate their shadowed nature, a completely unrealistic technique, but one that's vital to help bring the figure to some kind of life. Finally, the eyebrows were dabbed on with sponge.

Indeed, lacking as I do an airbrush, all colours were applied with bits of sponge cut up and shaped for whatever type of painting I was doing at the time.

You can click on all pictures for biggitude...

Nasty Nick Part 5: Casting

2010-07-03T06:47:00.000-07:00

Somewhat ineptly, I completely failed to take any photos of the casting process. Nevertheless, I'll try to describe it, though as mentioned in an earlier post, when it came to applying the latex I followed Lars Carlsson's superbly informative video pretty much slavishly.

First, make the skin, for which you will need liquid latex. To make painting the head easier later on, it's best to tint the latex first to provide a base colour. For this, use special latex colourants (I get mine from another London store, 4D Modelshop - £2.20 for 150g). White, a smidge of brown, a hint of red, and a dab of yellow, together with a tincture of blue, muck around until you find a colour you like. I haven't yet tried their recipes, but this is an excellent looking guide to how to achieve various flesh tones, from pale & interesting (okay, pasty) to dark as dark. When you're happy with the colour, add a little to the latex - the latex should be very pale, it darkens as it dries. Experiment first.

I made the actual skin by pouring a little of the tinted latex into one half of the mould and dabbing it around with some sponge. Build up a few layers, adding each as the preceding one dries. Strengthen the mouth area with pieces of bandage soaked into the latex. Also, it would probably be useful to add a smallish 'plate' made from a semi-flexible material (perhaps thin styrene sheet) to the lower inside of the mouth because that is where only a thumb acts upon the mouth, and the small surface area of the thumb will push through the flexible foam and rubber. The upper part of the mouth doesn't need it as the other four fingers will manipulate it.

You want both halves of the mould to have a few layex layers built up so that the colouring is fairly opaque. To create cavities for the eyes, I used the same hemispherical shapes that the final eyes will be made from and actually glued them to the inside of the latex skin exactly where the final eyeballs will need to go. Then clamp both halves of the mould together with the bungee ropes, seal around the edges outside with platicine, and pour some more latex inside and tilt the mould around to get the latex to fill the seam between the two halves. When you're satisfied with this, leave for a few hours to dry.

What I'm trying to get is a flexible foam puppet head with a cavity for my hand to go up it to manipulate the mouth. Ideally, I should have made a special core for the mould, but I couldn't be arsed. Instead, when the mould was ready with the dry latex skin coating the inside, I propped up the mould topsy turvey so the opening was at the top. I then put on a marigold washing-up glove and stuck my hand inside the mould, holding the inside of what would become the open mouth. Then I poured in the urethane flexible foam mix.

This stuff is magic! For this head I used Tiranti's Self Skinning Flexible Polyurethane Foam. Although self-skinning, the process to get it to skin is slightly more complex and is something I shall experiment with later. Suffice to say that for this puppet, I needed the latex skin.

So anyway, I poured it in around my marigold-glove-clad arm and held that arm dead still for fifteen minutes or so as the foam rose and set. It gets quite warm, but not dangerously so (though it may be hazardous without the protection of the rubber glove). When set, the glove is firmly embedded (it's the yellow thing poking out from underneath the neck) and you can slip your hand in and out. The fit was very tight, caused by the foam compressing the flesh of my hand and forearm as it expanded and cured. If using this technique again, I would wear a glove over that hand and then the rubber marigold glove on top of that, to form a slightly larger cavity. Once the foam was fully cured, which you can tell as the surface ceases to be tacky, I then removed the casting from the mould.

Then clean up the copious flashing on the seams, cut the eyelids open with a scalpel and remove the plastic hemispheres, and get painting the hair...

I used standard Liquitex Artists' Acrylics for the hair - it's surprisingly flexible and sticks well. Later, I will subtly colour the skin using similar paints in much the same way I coloured the static Stephen Fry sculpture. The eyes were made using the same technique as for the Patrick Moore eyes.

So, it's not yet finished, but here are some photos of it thus far:

Most of the skin colour is the base tinted latex, but some areas have already had some painting - the rubber of the neck was very thin causing the white foam to show through, so I painted that; I had painted eyebrows on but they were rubbish, so I've painted over them, and some other areas where the skin was too thin and the foam was showing had a similar treatment to the neck.

Also, the ear on the right was completely deformed due to some balls-up with the mould (I suspect that a pry-hole was too close to the ear so that when I shoved a screwdriver in to help prise the mould apart, the pressure of the screwdriver distorted the plaster). So I ended up sculpting a new ear, making a small plaster mould and casting a tinted latex skin. I then stripped part of the skin from the bust's distorted ear and glued the new skin on, a disturbingly quasi-surgical procedure... If you look carefully at the ear on the right (above), you can see where the new skin doesn't line up with the old; it will be patched up with latex at some point.

I'll be replacing the irises of the eyes with larger ones later, when I can get a friend to print out a sheet. I'll probably add veins to the eye on the left to give it a slightly bloodshot look (the eye on the right is, on Nick Griffin, in real life a false eye).

Nasty Nick Part 4: De-Moulding

2010-07-03T05:06:00.000-07:00

Next day, separate the mould halves - as mentioned above, you insert screwdrivers into the cavities formed by the clay pieces you added before pouring the second half. Note screwdrivers in plural - you should have applied the clay pieces on opposing sides of the mould, and using two screwdrivers, one in each side, you apply equal force to both sides of the mould simultaneously. This minimises the chances of splitting the mould, because you will be applying a tremendous amount of force to split the halves apart. This is another nerve-wracking procedure...

Dont worry about any damage to the clay sculpture as the halves part - you'll be destroying it anyway as the only way to remove it from the mould is to dig it out. Here, you can see the start of this process:

Here's the front of the mould after the clay has been removed. Note the markings in red pen - they highlight holes in the plaster, caused by air bubbles during mouldmaking. I suspect this was due to a combination of slapdash application of the plaster and beading caused by a lack of dulling spray.

I strapped the two halves together with bicycle/luggage bungee ropes for a couple of days so that as it cured, the two halves wouldn't warp.

The mould will be strapped together in exactly the same way when pouring the latex, of which more later...

Nasty Nick Part 3: Pouring The Mould

2010-07-03T04:13:00.001-07:00

Now that the dividing wall has been formed and the keys added, there follows the utterly nerve-wracking process of pouring the plaster. This is a horrible business as the sculpture you've spent hours or days making disappears under an opaque layer of gloop.

Before describing this, however, a quick note. There's one thing I didn't do and that was to spray a layer of 'dulling spray' all over the sculpture and clay dividing wall. This is very useful because it helps the plaster to stop 'beading' when poured onto the sculpture. As it was, I had no dulling spray and I found that the plaster ran off the shiny surface of the acrylic-sealed clay. This may have played a part in the discovery of lots of holes in the mould (to be discussed later).

First, dribble some plaster on, blowing it to try to get rid of air bubbles - air bubbles are your enemy! They are complete bastards so purge the feckers! Add more plaster to make a relatively thin layer of plaster only. Let it dry.

Then add another layer with 'scrim' - sheets of burlap (a coarse-weave hessian-like cloth) which you can just discern in the photo below embedded in the plaster. These will strengthen the mould enormously, and are similar in function to the glass fibre sheets used when making GRP mouldings. The presence of the burlap also means that if - quelle horreur - the mould should split, it won't actually fall apart into fragments. To apply it, cut it into pieces around 15cm by 10cm, dip them into the plaster to soak them, then slap them over the mould, adding more plaster as you go. Build up a couple of layers.

Add more plaster and smooth it off while it's still wet.

Bung another layer of plaster on, with more burlap, and then leave it overnight to cure completely.

Next day, turn the whole thing over - careful, it weighs a lot - and remove the clay walls and 2x4 blocks. You now have half a mould with the face buried in plaster and the rear exposed. Again, hard to see, but you can just make out the four keys as indentations around the edge of the plaster:

Now, do not rush into pouring the second half of the mould! If you do, you'll end up with a solid block of plaster encasing the sculpture and you'll have to smash it apart.

You need to ensure that the second half, when set, will separate cleanly from the first half. To do this, first liberally coat the exposed plaster which you can see in the photo above with vaseline - don't bother coating the scupture, just the plaster mould.

Then add a few small pieces of clay, around an inch long by half across, to the plaster. When the plaster for the second half of the mould is poured, these will form cavities, or pry holes, which will allow you to push screwdrivers into these holes which will help when you come to separate the mould halves later. You can see better examples here, on Richard Svensson's invaluable blog.

There are no photos of me making the other half of the mould. Partly, I was too busy, partly I couldn't be arsed. It was much the same procedure as the first half. When you've done with pouring the various layers of plaster, let it cure overnight.

Nasty Nick Part 2: Preparing The Mould

2010-07-03T03:46:00.000-07:00

Because I want to make a flexible casting, it is necessary to make a hard mould (when mouldmaking and casting, the general rule-of-thumb is essentially that opposites attract - if you want to make a rigid casting, make and use a flexible mould). Now, for various reason which I'll go into later, I need to make a latex (rubber) skin, and for that the ideal mould material is plaster. This is because the liquid latex required to make the skin dries partly by evaporation and partly through some of the moisture being absorbed by the mould, and plaster is ideal for this.

Again, Tiranti came to the rescue for plaster - in this case, I used Prestia Classic (Dental) Plaster. In retrospect, this was a mistake, but more on that later...

Now, the mould must be made in two pieces. This means making one half first, 'blanking off' the rest of the sculpture beforehand by making a dividing wall.

First, lay the sculpture (master, or pattern) down flat on a bed of clay - this bed allowss the sculpture to settle into it so it doesn't move. Note the clingfilm, used so as to prevent the clay scullpture sticking to the clay bed:

The sculpture has been sprayed with an acrylic clear spray. This is vitally important! Water-based plaster will not take to drying when poured over water-based clay. The acrylic spray therefore seals in the moist clay, giving a dry surface for the plaster to dry on.

Blocks of 2x4 wood have been laid around the sculpture - these will act as a support for the sheets of clay which will be added to create the dividing wall, as follows...

Make sure the clay wall seals the edges of the sculpture by using soft tools made of wood, or your fingers.

Next, build another clay wall around the dividing wall - this is simply to stop the plaster slopping about all over the place, and gives a clearly defined edge to the mould. One final, important note, at this stage - it's not clear in the photos (there's one on the left, between the sculpture's 'hair' and the corner of the clay wall), but around the sculpture are four clay 'keys', wedge-shaped bits of clay which will form depressions or holes in the face of the mould. When the second half is poured later, it will form corresponding raised sections which will help the two halves of the mould fit, or 'key', together accurately.

Nasty Nick Part 1: The Sculpt

2010-07-03T03:33:00.001-07:00

I've now reached the stage where I have a virtually finished ready-to-use Spitting Image stylee puppet head of Nasty Nick Griffin, so I thought it might help other bumbling amateurs like myself if I show how I got to that stage. But before doing so, you should take a look at this video which shows the construction of a very similar type of puppet (Karius and Baktus) by make-up wizard Lars Carlsson. I found it invaluable, along with various websites linked to during the next few posts.

First, the clay sculpture. You've seen it juxtaposed with the man himself in the previous post, so here are three more views of it. This is the finished item, made from the cheapest water-based pottery clay - literally the stuff they dig out of the ground. As I live in London, I buy mine from Alec Tiranti Ltd., a superb sculptors' supply shop on Warren Street. It's cheapest if you buy the 25kg block but, fuck me, you risk your back getting it home on the tube...

As the stuff dries in air (well, the surface does, leading to cracking), it's generally advisd by Those In The Know that you sculpt quickly. Fortunately, as it took three days or so for me to sculpt it, Those In The Know also point out that you can keep it from drying by wrapping it in polythene whenever you take a long break from working on it. I would simply put a large carrier bag over it, sealed at the bottom with a rubber band. I should imagine giving it the odd light mist with a fine water spray would help.

I'm not sure how much useful advice I can give about how to sculpt - I started with a wooden stick mounted on a base, I then bulked out the stick with wire and newspaper and masking tape to make a crude 'skull' or armature onto which to apply the clay. This serves to anchor the clay, keeping it from slipping down the stick, and saves on clay. Start off roughing the gross shapes, getting the proportions right, adding detail later. Have a good browse of this forum for some great advice and to see some excellent work.

In terms of the design, if I was sculpting him again I'd give him a much fatter, bulkier neck and take in the forehead a bit, also making it squarer. I would also make a smaller scale maquette first to get the overall look and proportions right, before committing to full-size clay, but hey-ho, I'm fairly happy with it for a first attempt.

Shitting Image...

2010-05-20T13:28:00.000-07:00

Bloody hell, it's been over a year since my last post!

Well, anyone keeping an eye on my other blogs will have noticed my involvement in a failed project (currently on hold, it will get finished, but just not for now...) and much foul-tempered ranting.

Meanwhile, a new project beckons, of which this is merely the beginning...

It's arch fat fascist twat Nick Griffin, bargain-bin Fuhrer of the British National Party (BNP) and gratifyingly smashed to smithereens in the recent, frankly bizarre, general and council elections.

It's nice to get back to sculpting, a medium I'm far happier with than drawing.

Suffice it to say that I have in mind a wildly ambitious project (which will probably go tits up as is customary with anything I involve myself with), so watch this space...

Spanking children? That is illogical...

2009-05-01T05:41:00.000-07:00

Dr Spock - Benjamin Spock, not Star Trek's Mr Spock - was the revolutionary childcare expert who transformed American parents' attitudes to children in the 1960s. Less of the Eisenhower-era, almost Victorian, stern, remote parenting, and more cuddles, affection and general fluffiness. Over on the ISCA forum, I contributed two drawings of him for their Birthday Caricatures section. The first was bloody awful, so I won't bother reproducing it here.

But I'm rather pleased with the second, which you can see below, together with an inset photo of the good doc, seeing as probably nobody reading this blog has the faintest idea what he looked like...

The style harks back to my old style fifteen years ago, and now I'm getting back more into drawing, it's a style I'm the most comfortable with. It's not a million miles away from Bill Plympton's early caricatures, before he became an ace indie animator (Your Face etc.).

Drawing

2009-04-28T09:27:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned way back in my first post on this blog, I'm not much cop at drawing. This, of course, is a huge drawback for someone wanting to explore the art of caricature. Thus, I'm starting to draw more, fully aware that I need to do some serious learning as well as practising if I'm to get anywhere.

So, here is my version of everyone's favourite bogeyman, Adolf Hitler (done for the International Society of Caricature Artists' birthday forum thread)...

...which I then incorporated into a mini-comic strip for b3ta (click on it for biggitude):

Hitler is actually surprisingly difficult to draw, in that apart from the iconic graphic signifiers of the slicked-over parting and toothbrush moustache, there isn't actually an awful lot going on with his face. The eyes are quite piercing, and the subject's right eye tends to look slightly sleepy in contrast to the piercing left eye, and there's the surprisingly broad nose, but apart from that, not a lot, as one of the foremost magicians of our age would say...

Sculpey Tips

2009-04-22T00:07:00.000-07:00

Recently, I joined the International Society of Caricature Artists, a US-based organisation. Quite apart from the friendly reception when I first posted on their forum, it has proven to be excellent inspiration! I have already garnered various tips on using Super Sculpey, my modelling clay of choice - as well as that of most small-scale sculptors, it transpires.

So here are my Top Sculpey Tips:

First, you can use balled-up tinfoil as a core for sculptures, especially heads. Doing that would have cut down hugely on the amount of Sculpey used in, for example, the Stephen Fry piece, which is solid and weighs in at 600-plus grams (that's a lot of Sculpey for a relatively small item). Tinfoil can also be used to bulk out wire armatures, and can be shaped to a considerable degree before a 'skin' of Sculpey is overlaid and more detail is added.

Second, I can use my plastic eyes now! In an old post on my companion blog, McTodd Animates!, I described how to make fairly realistic eyes very cheaply, and with little specialist equipment. Stick such an eye in a soft Sculpey piece and bake it and, sadly, it melts...

However, the great David O'Keefe, in an interview in the ISCA magazine Exaggerated Features (no link possible, I'm afraid), gave a great tip: sculpt the eyes in place, and when baking your sculpture, place a small wad of wet cotton wool onto the eyes before placing it in the oven.

I tried it at the weekend and it works! The clay covered by the cotton wool stays soft, and can be hardened with a hairdrier (it takes a while, mind).

Finally, don't follow the baking instructions on the pack (135 celsius, IIRC, for 15 minutes per quarter-inch thickness of clay). Reduce the teperature to 80 celsius and almost double the time. Also, if you can, leave the clay in the oven when you switch it off - let it cool slowly to room temperature along with the oven, you'll pretty well completely avoid cracking that way.

Further experiments will take place...

Mr Fry is beside himself...

2009-03-27T05:35:00.001-07:00

Last night I did some dry-sponging of his hair and eyebrow, to add light-grey highlights and generally tidy it up a bit, as well as sticking a pair of irises onto the eyes. Hair colouring may have been too subtle as it doesn't show up so well, except from the side. Hmmm - still more work to be done...

Paint Job

2009-03-26T01:27:00.000-07:00

As alluded to in the previous post, I did actually slap a load of flesh-coloured paint onto the sculpture but it just didn't look right. So I tried mixing my own, using artists' acrylics - big mistake, it ended up looking lobster pink and shiny, as if poor old Stephen Fry had been baking in the sun too long!

So I ended up re-priming it and having another go, by lightening Revell's modelmakers' flesh-tone acrylic paint with their matt white, and adding just a tiny tincture of yellow. Simply painting a uniform colour onto something gives a dull and lifeless look, even on a three-dimensional object like a sculpture, as can be seen below left.

Consequently, it is necessary to add other tones and highlights, somewhat as an artist would do with a two-dimensional painting. Most modelmakers, and the puppetmakers on Spitting Image, use fancy (read expensive) airbrushes, something I don't possess and, being a completely tight bastard, have no intention of possessing any time soon. Thus, to achieve the skin tones you can see below right, I had to experiment, eventually using a form of dry-brushing using sponge. One thing you have to remember is that modelmakers' acrylics dry damn fast, which is great for painting multiple coats in an evening but a bugger to dry-brush using brushes, hence the use of sponge.

The sponge I use is in the form of little blocks, around the size of a school pencil eraser, cut from sheets of furniture foam (of which I have a stock for making stop-motion animation puppets). Dip a corner of the sponge into the pot of acrylic paint so you have just a tiny little blob on the sponge. Smear this around and around onto a surface (I use disposable paper plates) until it appears that it won't make any more marks. You then rub this fairly firmly onto the surface of the model. The almost-dry traces of paint still in the sponge transfer quite nicely. You can also lightly dab the sponge to get even more subtle effects.

Stephen Fry's nose and cheeks were done using this method, with red paint. His lips were brush-painted with a darker shade of the skin-tone paint, but were too shiny and even in tone, so I dulled them by lightly dry-sponging with another shade of skin-tone and a little dry-sponged red on top to break the colour up even more. Dry-brush grey was sponged onto the chin and jowls, for that not-quite-five-o'clock-shadow look, and then some red was dry-sponged lightly onto that.

The 'hair' is simply the primer coat, touched up with some more grey. I'll likely re-paint it in better colours, but it'll do for now. The irises are the paper irises described in my companion blog, cut out and carefully placed - they aren't glued in and are only temporary to avoid the dead zombie-eyes look seen below left.

This is my first ever piece of figure painting (apart from the occasional tiny 1/35 scale model soldier decades ago), and I'm rather pleased with the results...

What a grey day

2009-03-23T06:17:00.000-07:00

Painting is a pain in the arse. Why? Because whenever you slap a coat of paint on a model/sculpture, nine million cracks you'd never previously noticed suddenly gape out at you. Cue much arsing about with putty...

Finally, however, I managed to cover most of the worst cracks, and am finding that a thick splodge of paint fills in hairline jobs. Below is the sculpture with a couple of layers of primer:

Last night I slapped a load of flesh-coloured paint on, but couldn't be bothered to take any photos. I hope to update tomorrow...

By the way, I probably shan't bother going into this kind of step-by-step detail in future, as most of my techniques will probably remain much the same. Only when I do something radically different will I post about the process. Otherwise, I shall try to restrict posts to showing finished projects.

Master baker? Bollocks...

2009-03-20T01:18:00.000-07:00

Baked the bust of Fry.

Lots of cracks. Well, a few.

Not happy, I think I baked it for too long at too high a temperature (i.e. according to the instructions).

Conclusion: ignore the instructions in a pack of Sculpey. Bake for longer, at a lower temperature, and then leave it in the oven when it's switched off, thus cooling more slowly.

Still, at least I was able to fill the cracks, which I sanded under a tap with fine wet-n-dry, and buffed with a rotary buffing thing. This weekend, I'll spray on a coat of primer.

Re-fried Fry...

2009-03-17T06:06:00.000-07:00

Lawks a mercy, but I've been a-faffing and a-farting around with this Stephen Fry sculpture more than anything else for ages... Patrick Moore was a doddle by comparison.

Two aspects of it grated:

First, I simply wasn't happy with the shape. The mouth was wrong, the lower jaw line was off (too narrow), all in all it was bobbins.

Second, I want more subtle colouring, of skin and hair, which means painting, and that can't be done with soft clay (well, it can, Luck & Flaw painted their plasticine sculptures, I understand, but at such a small scale as I operate, I don't think it's practicable). However, the stuff I use (Super Sculpey) can be baked (in a domestic oven) to a hard, pottery-like consistency, ideal for painting.

And so I have radically re-worked the sculpture, replacing the eyes with baked-hard Sculpey hemispheres (because those lovely plastic ones, sadly, melt in the oven) and the plasticine hair with Sculpey hair, as well as making the jawline heavier, though not, I feel, offensively so (I would hope that were Sir Stephen of Fry to see this blog, he would not be too hacked off with the way I've distorted his features).

This is the result, before baking (which I plan to do tonight):

Incidentally, apropos of bugger-all, did you know that Stephen Fry was named Pipe-Smoker of the Year in 2003 by The Chap magazine? Is there no end to the avuncular bastard's talents?!?!?!

Eyes right...

2009-03-13T04:34:00.000-07:00

On my other blog, McTodd Animates!, I went into considerable detail about how I make the eyes for these sculptures. Frankly, I can't be arsed to repeat it here, but you can follow this link to the original article if you're interested...

Stephen Fry

2009-03-12T07:42:00.000-07:00

Stephen Fry - wit, raconteur, writer (films, novels, newspaper columns, short stories), actor, comedian, film director, panel-show host par excellence, blogmeister, tech-head, jailbird, posh tea merchant, mentalist, big old gayer - is there anything he can't do?

In fact, if he wasn't such an all-round Good Egg, I'd bloody hate him. But how could you? The man is a veritable National Treasure. And it is in that capacity that I am currently working on a sculpture.

A couple of in-progress photos can be seen below...

Patrick Moore Redux

2009-03-12T07:23:00.000-07:00

On my companion blog, McTodd Animates!, I discussed the first caricature sculpture I made, of BBC telly's favourite bonkers xylophone-playing octogenarian stargazer, Sir Patrick Moore. It was made for an online b3ta challenge in January. With only two evenings to make it before the deadline, I wasn't entirely happy with it, but it went down well. Some time after, I made new eyes and re-made the hair, which really picked it up, as you can see below...

You've got to start somewhere...

2009-03-12T06:57:00.000-07:00

McTodd Animates! has spawned! Mainly to prevent the aforementioned companion blog from clogging up with non-animation posts...

Since I was a nipper, I've been fascinated by the art of caricature. At school, I used to draw little caricatures of schoolfriends, teachers, famous people off the telly and the like. My interest was further boosted by the advent of the ITV series Spitting Image, brainchild of the great caricature sculptors Luck & Flaw (Peter Fluck and Roger Law).

Unfortunately, I can't really draw for toffee but, at the risk of sounding arrogant, I do have some ability at Making Stuff, whether scale models, simple gadgets or - latterly - small sculptures. In fact, it was just before Spitting Image appeared that I first had a go at sculpting clay caricatures, under the influence of Luck & Flaw's occasional magazine covers which featured stunning tableaux depicting (in)famous politicians sculpted in plasticine. However, I only made a few and abandoned the whole thing until now, over twenty-five years later.

Hence this blog, which will feature my efforts at creating caricatures of famous people sculpted in clay...