OK… so my friend Lars is having a Halloween party and I was feeling a bit weird because I really didn’t want to show up sans costume so I whipped up this two hour mask. Two hours because that is how long it took and a worthwhile investment in time and energy.
I bought a cheap kitty mask at Joanne’s that had a reasonably thick fabric base. I pulled off the kitty crappola, stripping it down to the base without much trouble. I then enlarged the eyes to accommodate my delicate features and got down to getting out some colorful fleece and the good old hot glue gun.
As Lars is of Scandinavian descent , I thought a troll would pay a nice respectful nod to his heritage and went up to hunt up some aluminum armature wire in my studio. A few minutes later on the sewing machine and voila! a long nose. In goes the armature wire and then it was stuffed not too tightly with some polyfill. The end of the armature wire was twisted into a circular base and then hot glued onto the mask being sure to leave extra material for wrinkles and such. The rest of the mask was put together with hot glue also. Pieces were approximated to the areas and then slowly stretched and glued and stretched and glued as I made my way around the edges. Fleece has a lovely stretch to it and works admirably for this kind of form fitting work. The best part of this all was the nose that could be bent into many shapes and it was during the course of the evening. People laughed and that is good.
Manuela needed a costume for Raks Spooki, New England’s largest and longest running gothic belly dance festival, featuring dancers from the homelands of HP Lovecraft, Stephen King and Edgar Allen Poe.
The costume is actually two piece and I used acrylics in three different painting sessions to get a modulated grayscale going so as to lend an extra dimensionality to the bones. In addition, every corpse needs some worms! In the pictures they are in her hands. They are 18″ dowel rods painted black, with two ping pong balls hot glued for the eyes. Some light flowing material cut into strips was fed through an eye hook in the top and then a brightly colored piece of a boa was hot glued in between the eyes for an upstanding and outstanding hairdo. Manuela will be doing a routine where she will be using the worms to dance and fly through the air. I love puppets!
For those who are interested in attending some otherworld performances:
“Raks Spooki IV” A Gothic Belly Dance Event Sun Nov. 15th, 7pm
The Regent Theatre, 7 Medford St. , Arlington , MA
Happy Halloween! I hope y’all had the best of the best day of the year. Festivities for us actually started the night before when we went to see F.W. Murnau’s 1922 classic, Nosferatu, accompanied by a musical arrangement by the Devil’s Music Ensemble. It was a real treat. The next day brought wild weather as warm winds from a southerly storm shook and bent the trees all day. Brightly colored leaves swirled everywhere. An anniversary dinner for our fourteenth year, some old black white movies and then off to a friends house for a costume party. A great day and evening!
Well in New Zealand anyway! Below are images of Woolungosaurus glendowerensis in action doing something useful for the Nelson Provincial Museum.
Taking advantage of a rare beautiful weather day, I got out and finally finished the fence. This meant fashioning some gate latches with the scrap lumber I had left and then putting up some decorative trellis like pieces over the main gate. And then onto the final section of work. The finials.
Finials are necessary for the life of the post. You need to prevent water from getting into the ends of the posts for during the winter, when that water freezes, it will render the posts worthless. I had decided on flat surfaces, so we could put items on top to decorate but it took a while for me to find the perfect material. I tried a wood plank but just could not seem to find a piece that understood what straight and flat meant. Casting about, I came upon the perfect finials at a local discount lumberyard. For 12 bucks, I scored 28 pieces of slate sized 6×6 and 6×8. A bit of liquid nails and voila!! They went up as easily as I had imagined.
We already have one resident up. The next is a T-rex with plans during the winter to create and fill all the available spots with something fun overlooking the yard.
Good grief! Time is just screaming along and it is now October. In the past month, I have managed to become a grandfather, lay a new kitchen floor, install the baseboard and repaint the kitchen, bum around with Mick on her vacation, pop a rib while sword fighting with one my vastly superior mates, exhibit my amazing clumsiness by crushing my left my foot against an immovable object and just most recently bring the Great Grimpen Mire onto this plane of existence. There are of course a few dozen assundries that happened but these seem to be the memorable highlights.
Grimpen and Terrance’s will be performing a skit together at the ODDITORIUM, Friday, October 9th in Cambridge. If you in the area come by and see us! We will be doing a recital of the Duckling from Dorset, A Cautionary Whimsy.
Grimpen was once a famous literary character. There are two clues in this post. Wonder if anyone might know who he really is……
Congratulations to my son, Matt and his wife Sue who have had their first. Her name is Zoey, 7 pounds 4 ounces, everything intact and healthy and ready whoop it up. Note the great monkey toes!! This kiddo comes into a world stuffed with relatives, cousins, and every version of grand someone that you can think of. The challenge will be not spoiling her!
The central image is by Edmund Sullivan who illustrated a translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald in 1913.
The Rubaiyat itself is a collection of quatrains written during the course of Omar Khayyam’s life – May 31, 1048 to December 4, 1131. Khayyam was a Persian poet, mathematician and scientist. The original illustration depicts Fitzgeralds translation of Khayyam’s quatrain number 26.
Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the wine
To talk; one thing is certain, that life flies;
One thing is certain, and the rest is lies;
The flower that once has blown forever dies.
Overall design created for Necon’s Thirtieth Anniversary.
Late last year , I was contacted by the director of the Mausonian museum if I would be interested in a position in their bone washing department but I had to defer as I was still attempting to exhaust these creative urges that wash over me. He also mentioned that they had discovered a small draconian arboreal flyer which they have named the Leaf Tailed Dragon.
It is approximately 30 inches in length, discovered in a recently evolved volcanic rift east of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. This entire area at on time was a heavily forested swamp with giant trees along with the attending giant bugs and swamp creatures. Primarily an insectivore, it likely also fed on snails and small reptiles. The wide rudder like appendage on the tail served as a dynamic in-flight foil for rapid maneuvering and if draped over the creature while resting may have provided camouflage of a sort. It certainly would have been one of the smaller denizens in this environment.
For security reasons, the exact location is being kept a secret however in their usual method of operation when dealing with a find of any significance, they have once again uprooted their operations and simply moved the base museum and its staff to the site. Apparently, they have also undiscovered evidence of a possible aquatic species and are hoping to make a real discovery in that area. Anyway, he wondered if I would be interested in doing this replica at a third scale and the result is below.
As an authorized reseller of Mausonian museum replica specimens, it can be found in the Battleduck.com store or by clicking on the picture below.
Necon 29 has come and gone! The economy apparently kept the attending numbers a bit lower however it seems to me that this actually worked in favor of the convention as things seemed a little bit closer and more personal than usual. All in all, everything went pretty smoothly.
The art show was actually a little busier than I would’ve expected. The food was good and the company great. The roasting of Von and Wes was a heavy basting with a chewing of the meat while it was still on the spit…..Ouch! I hope those sweet people come back next year. Not sweet because they tasted good, sweet because they are nice people!!! Lars Grant-West, the artist guest of honor, made absolutely gorgeous medals for the Olympics. Weather was typical of late with some thunder storms at night but it left off for beautiful balmy days with cool ocean sea breezes.
Perhaps one of the oddest events that happened and only could happen at the event called Necon was the synchronized drowning event organized by John Skipp. This has been captured beautifully by Madelon Wilson and can be seen can be seen at this address:
Synchronized Drowning Event
The sharing of lots of wonderful pictures made me realize that there were many Necons all going on at the same time and I am wondering which one I attended. Check the links below to see the many different flavors of the wonder that is known as Necon.
Monica Orourke’s Necon
Tracy Carbone’s Necon
John McIlveen’s Necon
