DECAPITAAATIOOON!

So, the convention was last weekend.  And I've been trollin' the interwebs since Monday morning in desperation.  I have finally FINALLY been shown a photo from the con of my hard work.  The wonderful DSK has found a photo of my axe being wielded by Robare.

Show'em your METAL face!

The mighty Separator in all it's bloody glory.

The original photo can be found here, along with a hundred thousand or so other photos from the convention.  I plan on trollin' the interblags more for photos of my hard work.  So hopefully, there will be more.

Coming soon

Alright, the axe is almost done now.

The next chunk of work for Comic-con is all detail work and the dagger for the axe-man's girlfriend who's going to dress as Ophelia.  Since I had half a brain for this one, I'll be getting lots of process shots so I can step-by-step this bad-mother.

Fun fact: you can get a giant axe and a short sword out of the same ethafoam sheet.

Been a long time.

It's been a while, and I promised more axe photos and such.  While lacking pictures of its current state of completion, I do have a decent spread of build shots.

I document my process, and no one is surprised!

Step one.

First I drew out a pattern and prepared the world for an axe made of such RAW AND BRUTAL METAL.  I had a bunch of reference shots from around the internets.  It's a surprisingly (not really) huge axe.

Fleshing out the pattern, the ruler (for scale) is 18 inches.

Step two.

Step two: cutting the roughs out of ethafoam (soft, sort of spongy, but reasonably sturdy foam).  The handle is PVC.  Now, the problem I'm going to have at this point is painting the thing.  Ethafoam is a smooth closed cell foam and takes paint poorly.

Step 3.

Ahh, now we're getting somewhere.  More carving and cutting.  The blades as well as center spike have been shaped and the center fit to the PVC.  Next, I have to begin attaching it, more detailing and preparing the handle.

Step 4.

Oh, look.  Attachment!  The blades are supported and attached with aluminum flat-stock.  This was it's got some sturdiness.  At this point, I had found better reference material, and Michael of Puppet Kitchen gave me the advice to use charcoal foam for the top.  So, that whole top had to go.

Safety tip, kids, always be careful when you carve INTO foam to insert your support rods or flat stock.

Fuckin'...ow...

Moving on!

Step 5.

It's starting to come together now.  The detailing on the blades was a pain and I neglected to use a pattern (always make a pattern, kids) which meant each one is a little different.  They aluminum also gave me some problems where it angled and popped through the foam where it had been carved out for flames.  OH, WOE IS ME.

Damn, what a sweet axe.

And now some detail!

Step 6.  Also: huge dork.

After problem solving adhesives and carving down the charcoal foam (and making a new, accurate top), the thing's really coming together.  Yeah, I'm a huge dork.  Oh, and I gave it a stupid little face because we had a spare tongue lying around.

Ppptthhhbbbb.

...Well, it IS a puppet studio.  We're professional five-year-olds...

"Stab!  Stab-stab!  I have a traumatic past!"---Carl.

And a HUGE thanks to the Puppet Kitchen for putting up with me and letting me use the space while they're between gigs!  Michael, Emily, Eric, you guys ROCK!

Stab stab-stab.

I live.

Yeah, I'm alive again.  It's been sort of rough being me the past few weeks.  I'm working in a puppet studio called The Puppet Kitchen baking puppets before I go to my strength-sapping night job.

IN THE MEANWHILE:

1.  I'm going to start working more on the ESS related comics.  At work.  Being a bad worker.
2.  Mr. Tep wanted me to alert the masses that he is on Twitter and the downfall of man should be any day now he's quite pleased with it.  So, Mr. Tep will be updating that and I'll try to get a Twitter page or something.
3.  I'm gonna be working on small hand-crafted bits and bobs related to some of the blog posts and selling them on N. Tep Enterprises' Etsy page.  So to share: here's a prototype for the Bad-luck Dæmons that will be up there soon enough.  It's about two inches long.

That's all for now.  Sorry, all two of you who check this, that posts have been sporadic.  Myself and Ali W. have been busy with the ESS, jobs, life in general and an underwhelming supply of cider.

Old sculptures: Headus Crabus, the common headcrab.

Who here has played Half Life or Half Life 2?

...

Really?  No one?

Well, Half Life is a shooter that centers around the physicist Gordon Freeman(he can kick your ass).  Mostly, Dr. Freeman finds himself fighting off hostile aliens, mutated humans and other sci-fi baddies.

The enemy everyone loves to hate is the head crab.

We hate them so much!

These things look kinda harmless, don't they?

"SCREEE!"

HOLY CRAP!  

They screech and jump at you, trying to couple with your head and turn you into a horrible zombie thing.

So, of course, I had to make one eventually.

Look out!  He'll eat your brains!

But no one's gonna eat your eyes...

Finally!

The Blightshade is finished.  The sculpt is done and ready to paint!

 

  

 

The Bogleech's Blightshade, now in clay.

This guy stands 6.5 inches tall.  The head is four inches long.

Painting to come soon.

Sunday? Already?

I really enjoy my lazy Sunday art posts...

As I may have mentioned.  I worked with Dr. Paul Redgrave on a project or two in my college years.  He also knew someone who was an anthropologist by the name of Doctor Dorian Petran.  Who wandered into the wilds of China with the ideals of finding a lost civilization.


I got a letter from Dr. Petran (by way of Dr. Redgrave) describing a "man with a large fanged mouth, snout-like nose, spines along the brow and head, with large horns.  They call them selves, Ingalat."  He spent a number of months with them.  I just got a few descriptions and one illustration(which I packed amongst hundreds of notebooks in various places and cannot be located as of yet). 

The first rough sculpt.

Being an idiot (or jsut absent minded) I have only my photos of the sculpts and not the illustrations that I neglected to scan.  Thus, sculpture and a lazy Sunday post.

 The more refined sculpt.

Contribution from the late Martin V. Shiloh.

One of these days, I'm going to post up some short biographies of the ESS members, founders and helpers.  Although, I did give a pretty extensive background on the whole organization.

One of the founding New York members (from around 1927) was a fellow called Martin V. Shiloh.

He was a specialist in archeology and loved to gallivant around Europe.  He had that typical Lovecraftian fascination with Hyperboria and Mu, the lost civilizations of the "Golden Age of Men."  Most his searching was in the Mediterranean with a Polish gentleman named Christoph Zebrowskiwho was a treasure hunter of sorts.  An Indiana Jones sort of fellow.  Professor Shiloh went missing in the fall of 1939 while researching in southern China.

Well, Professor Shiloh donated something like 85% of the ESS library and was a enormous archeology nerd.  His cataloged work and findings are so extensive (and unorganized) that I've only begun going through them (because I'm the young, stupid, clerical member of the society and Dr. Jones has way more going on).  But I found something cool and thought it deserved some attention.

From the papers with the photo:

"5/6/29.  Found in a burned longboat.  Remarkable craftsmanship.  Appears ceramic, very solid.  Depicts Thor struggling in coils of world serpent."

Professor Shiloh was a man of few words.

Oh goodness, in-prog sculpts!

 

Blightshade body is coming along...

 

Sans tongue.  but I think it will come along alright.

Fun fact: I dropped the head before I took this and panicked that I ruined everything.

 

What?  What's this?

AI AI CTHULHU FHTAGN!

Yes this is a very lazy post.

Sculpture is SERIOUS BUSINESS.

My desk.

In my college years I had the fortune of having a studio.  

I went to the Cleveland Institute of Art and was the last of the five-year BFA students. And I was in sculpture which meant my studio was the size of most Manhattan single-room apartments.  And in my fifth year, I had a desk that I worked at, and another table that hung out in my studio because no one else wanted it.  It was my storage space and became a cluttered alchemist's table for a project (where I dragged it out into the display spaces with a pile of notes and all manner of cool junk I accrued).

I used it to display a spread of my work during an open house.  It was fun and I got free Great Lakes Brewing Co. ale.  I miss metal working.

This was "The Box of Infinite Probability."

My argument to this one was based entirely on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, and Schrödinger's cat.  It contained anything and everything.  Hey, since you can't open it and look, you can never know.

The helmet was for my BFA room.  It was designed after the Arakkoa in Warcraft.

I displayed it on my horse skull (yes, I have a horse skull.  no, you shouldn't be surprised) as it was sized right and armour needs to protect something.

Some "alchemystic" tools I forged.  The crook became a fireplace poker my father uses and the long blade went into the BFA room.  I still need to do a project with these...

Pickled punks.  These will get a single post eventually.  Suffice to say, I love things in jars.

Cast cement idols.  They were designed with the intent of being roughly palm sized and each have a surface area that was made for my thumb, to be used as worry-stone type objects.

Everything here was in someway related to a narrative, my entire studio was something between an artist's studio and mad scientist's lab.  It was great...

I think of being an artist as something like an alchemist, really.  Trying to find why and what through experimentation...making works that are outside of yourself, that contribute to society...fun stuff.

The Blightshade

There is, out there in the interblag, a gentleman named Jonathan, who is into horrifying biology, monsters and has been researching a realm known as Mortasheen for the past 7 years.  He has done, in my humble opinion, some of the best illustrations of other-world zoology of our era.  I sought him out (not terribly difficult, but it did involve a trek through several miles of sewer) to ask his permission to begin a sculpt of one of the Mortasheen known as the blightshade.

Featuring the corner of my computer!

Ooo-aah.  Skullpture!

It's creepy, only in the best of ways.  It's an in-progress sculpt and I'm going to post the sculpt as it continues.

Share and enjoy.

We don't drop the pianos or the toilet seats.

Anyone familiar with Dead Like Me (A show about life after death) is familiar with the horrible porcupine-imps that cause calamity and death.

 

Gravelings.

If anyone was still wondering: I love monsters.  Almost anything unearthly, I'm all over.  These guys endeared me in their stumpy hands and porcupine spines.  Also, they're surly.  I like surly characters.

 

They fit into the classic realm of the fey, existing just outside human sight.  As head reaper, Rube, says: "They're not invisible, you just can't see them."  These things are as vital to the show's character list as the humans (and reapers) they have this fantastic hunched monkey gait and have that "so close to human they creep you out a little" thing going for them.  I would love to say this was a sculpt for the show, but it's just something I did last fall in my free time.

  I still want to cast the bugger...

Garm: The Surgeon

So, I like stories.  I like working within the weird and mystical.  So I've made a cult or two on paper (hopefully nothing carried over to real people).  My favorite is the anarchistic Children of Xyn.  They worship entropy and decay, reveling in the gradual destruction of all things.

They have a hierarchy, sort of.  There's the leader, calling himself Ragnarok and using those that follow him as puppets.  And then there are the surgeons, the few who aren't held in thrall by Ragnarok.

Garm is their leader.  He's distinguished himself from the others by proving very (very) hard to kill.  I've sculpted him twice.  Once in a (just under) life-sized ceramic bust.  Once in full-body on an action figure scale.

That one is about nine inches tall.  He hangs out on my desk.

The whole idea behind these guys came from something I drew in high school, and it evolved from there.  These gas-mask wearing monstrosities with broken bio-mechanical parts.  This spawned into an elaborate character driven idea and a fascination with possession resulting in the cult as I currently imagine it.  I sort of imagine Garm as the Grima Wormtongue of the cult, the treacherous right hand man of the king.

Garm is also the name of the hound that guards Hel (the goddess and the underworld in Norse myth) and in some descriptions I've found, its front is always wet and red with blood.  Fitting for a surgeon whose duty is outfitting the willing and unwilling with weapons that don't fit their biology, no?