Who Ate The Pie At Night...

As a break from the Martian, I ended up spending the last couple of evenings sculpting a clay caricature of Sir Patrick Moore, telly's mad octogenarian stargazer, for the weekly Challenge on the inestimable b3ta website.

It was nice to have a task with a clear (and near!) deadline, forcing me to get off my arse and do something! And the feedback on b3ta has been nice too...

Blast from the past

While visiting my parents recently, I was rooting around in a cupboard full of old stuff of mine and found the original model building I blew up back in the 1980s (see this thread: http://mctoddanimates.blogspot.com/2008/11/first-steps.html).

Retrieving it and carting it back home, I thought I'd chuck some photos of it on here...

See you, see me

Well, here I am, back from my Christmas break and, as usual, I didn't get as much accomplished as I would have liked.

Nevertheless, I made a new set of tentacles and I've been trying to make eyes for the Martian, which you can see in this post.

They're just over 20mm in diameter, and made from SuperSculpey clay. I actually used the clear plastic hemispheres you can see them sitting in to mould the clay. In order for the resulting hemispheres to be slightly smaller than the plastic shapes, which will be used as eye sockets, I 'jiggled' the clay after pressing it in to create a small gap all around, before cutting it off and baking it hard.

I'm not entirely satisfied with the paint job (done using modelmakers' acrylics) and will have another crack at the irises and pupils. Note the pinholes in the pupils, made so I can animate the eyes moving in their sockets.