As far as projects of my own , next on the list are a VooDoo Joe comic book story (which I am in no mood for) and more animated cartoons (which is about as much fun as writing your name on a grain of rice). I don’t want to do either. I don’t really want to do anything right now except lament my station in life and watch from the outside with morbid curiosity as I am being led into success like a nervous dog being dragged to the vet for its own good.
…morbid curiosity only fills up so many hours of the day thought and I have to do something to fend off the disgust, regret, and bewilderment at everything that is my life that doesn’t involve my career.
Defying all logic I decide to make the next project a Voodoo Joe bust. Something I can throw up on kickstarter that won’t draw as much attention…something more manageable to competently refine the logistics end of it and prove I have the thing figured out and not every kickstarter project I do will end up being a clusterf*ck. This last one started out fine until the end when we learned that Kickstarter doesn’t give you anyone’s address and a good portion of the backers assume your emails requesting the address are spam. Just THIS very week I got two people who just now realized they were supposed to reply to the email in order to get anything. On top of that there was the occasional backer who sent an address under some new email, never explaining that they once were known as firefly82 or whatever silly email address they used to pledge in the first place. All this left me with a list of goofey names…another list of email with only names and addresses and no logical way to connect the two. Maddening. In the end itis my fault for assuming that the Kickstarter system would be a little more user friendly and not learning how to use the thing properly…but in my defense, I had one week to set the thing up or be bankrupt.
Anyhow…I figured a smaller project like a statue would be a good second pass at it to work out the kinks.
You see how I just keep f*cking myself? hmmm? So…now that it is more likely the logistics end of things will be easier to handle I go ahead and jam a stick in my eye on the production end by choosing a project that I rarely ever do…sculpting.
I’m in a sh*t mood can you tell?
Anyways…I dug out my sculpting tools that have been collecting dust for about four years and get a brick of “sculpty” brand modeling clay and mush out a rough Voodoo Joe to refine, detail, harden , and paint.
Pretty standard pose, but looking at it leaves me with the question “why bother”?” I mean…okay It’s Voodoo Joe and after I work on it a little it will look much like he does in the comic but so what? Who, other than a hard-core fans, is going to give a rats ass upon seeing it? It’s boring. Plus, it doesn’t have Joe’s body language…his posture is usually more lurching and threatening. that pose is somewhat menacing but mostly confident and defiant. Then I got the idea of making the base a Rodan “Gates of hell” – ish relief of zombie fetuses. Now THAT would be something! Yeah! F*ck that I’m not sculpting twenty, one inch, fetuses.
So I scribbled out a different poses maybe on with Joe holding a fetus and more lurching forward.
Yeah that’s better…and yes I did the first sculpt without planning anything or drawing it out first…and yeah that’s stupid.
so I monkeyed with that a little.
Then I realized that once I came up with the fetus base idea I was either going to do it or forever hate whatever base I did make because I COULD have made it better.
So…onto the base…
So far so good but I started running into a problem …as I got more than half way around I couldn’t help but start smooshing the finished side. Time to call in an expert.
My dear dear friend Chris Herndon does this sort of thing a lot and taught me how to make casts and molds it in the first place. “Scuplty” is a modeling clay that you cook in the oven for 15 minutes and it gets as hard as action figure plastic. My idea was to cook it partially so it is just hard enough to not smoosh and then cook the whole thing once i finished the other side. Herndon pointed out that if you over cook the stuff it becomes to brittle to make a cast out of and If I did it my way the original side would get over cooked in order to harden the second side. Good point… He then suggested I try “magic sculpt” a clay that is a two-part epoxy and hardens on its own without cooking. Hey, that’s a fine idea…let me just take the all the work I have so far and open a window… and throw it into the street. Did I mention he showed me how to do all this stuff in the first place? are you wondering why he is just now telling me there is a better clay? Me too.
upon hearing me opening the window he came up with a second Idea. He suggested I cut the base into two parts. finish them, cook them and glue them together. That’s a better idea than mine…which was jumping out the window and cursing the names of anyone who ever told me to follow my dreams on the way down.
So,that’s what I did. I finished one half ,cut the base in two, and then cooked them. I figured as long as I’m cooking I might as well harden up the other side of it so it will be sturdy enough to smoosh clay fetuses into without warping. That turned out to be stupid because once it is hardened the fresh clay won’t stick to it. FML. So I tried scoring/scratching up the blank side so the clay fetuses would have a rough surface to better cling to.
Nope, still didn’t work and I would have been better off using that pic to cut up my wrists like a 16 year old goth kid. I still might. This isn’t that big a set back though, it doesn’t take micheal angelo to sculpt half a circle.
SO I remade the other half of the base and shoved some fetuses on it and there we go.
I actually like it. I’m glad I didn’t pussy out and just go with a boring square base that said “VooDoo Joe” on it like I was leaning towards.
Now I just have to decide on which Joe pose and finish it.
In the meantime if you wanted to vote for Arsenic Lullaby “The Big Stall” for best original graphic Novel here…that would be helpful.
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