Steph's Brain Farts

All aboard the H Line!



This guy is made from wood, plastic, metal, various Japanese papers, upholstery trim, bronze paint, matteboard and paper clay. Phew! And a smidge of blood... there was one tiny incident with the X-acto yesterday.



So this is my piece for A.Okay's CTA Show, opening 2/15! My name isn't on the flyer (maybe because I don't have a special one-word psuedonym for myself?), but I promise you this piece will be featured there. I swear. So the assignment was to buy a model train of any kind and decorate it how you wish. I picked up an $11 wooden bullet train with magnetic fasteners and went from there. :D

Here's how it looked fresh out of the box...



And here we are with the shingling phase. I put a section of a cardboard tube on the roof to give the guy a more natural slope to his back and avoid corners for when it came time to shingle him. Unfortunately none of the online dollhouse stores had the small fishscale shingles in stock, so I had to resort to trimming the edges off of these tabbed shingles by hand. Considering I was planning of paper maché-ing each shingle by hand anyway, this extra step wasn't a big deal.



Here he is with 2/3 of this scales and a paperclay base for his tail. All that shingling and the smell of hot glue reminded me of the hours my Mom spent putting shingles on my dollhouse when I was 6!



A primitive head of matteboard and paperclay...



...then a bucha stuff happened all at once and he ended up looking like this.



I was going to document this much more but I got into a big time crunch and well, there we are. ;) I PROMISE I will take much nicer photos of him tomorrow before he begins his overnight journey to Chicago, so for now, bear with the yellowed, slightly blurry mess. I am one of the most impatient people on the planet, you see.


Rawr! It was great to get out of my element and start sculpting again. I forgot how much I miss making puppets and letting tangible materials have so much of a hold over a character. Great times, let's hope I find something nice to make from all the remnants I have leftover. So, if you find yourself in the Chicago area, please check out the show on the 15th and take lots of pics for me; I have to sit it out because I'll be in Sequoia National Forest with my Dork Bunny... hopefully, not snowed in. The fact that I'll need to buy snow chains for my Prius concerns me...

Thanks for looking, guys :)