Oh dear, I’m doing it again. Blogging all enthusiastically, then disappearing for a week. In my defence I’m still working on the costumes for Neverwhere which, as well as doing the odd day or two of overtime at work, is taking up every spare minute of my time and then some.
These are three raven skulls that I made the other day – and in the process of doing so I managed to pull a muscle in my shoulder that trapped a nerve, leaving me wearing my arm in a sling because everything hurt and I couldn’t feel my fingers. Oops. That’s what happens when you spend upwards of seven hours pinching a layer of Fimo into place over an armature of masking tape and paper clip wire, apparently. I won’t be doing that again in a hurry!
You can see the development of the skulls over on Flickr. I did the sculpting and, once the shapes were baked and hardened, I passed them on to Paul who painted them for me. We wanted them to look as though Vandemar had been wearing the rings for years, so Paul’s painted them to look somewhat aged and cracked.
In an ideal world I would have smoothed and sanded out all of those fingerprints, but time was of the essence! If anyone can see the fingerprints from the stage, I’ll be very surprised. Although Louise did spend part of last night’s rehearsal shortening Vandemar’s coat sleeves, otherwise nobody would have been able to see the skulls at all!
They’ve now been mounted onto rings, with glue that I can only hope will be strong enough to last through the entire run. Performances start next week, and I keep thinking that we must be into the final straight with the costumes by now. But Louise and I spent yesterday evening at the theatre and each came back with a to-do list longer than the one we’d started with, despite having sewed our way through the entire rehearsal.
We must be nearly there though, surely?