Vampire Bat Giveaway

To celebrate Halloween I am having a giveaway of a vampire bat magnet. The bat magnet measures 2" X 2 1/2" L .It is part of a trio of scary magnets I recently made.

The drawing of the winning persons name will take place on Nov. 1, 2010. To enter you need to be a follower of my blog and leave a comment to this post.

The other magnets are of a zombie craving (what else?) brainnnnsssss! And a monster who is seriously screwed!

I'll be listing these in my Etsy shop later today.

My work space is a sight! I'm working on a mask for Halloween. Replacing the hooks on all my fishing lures to get them ready for striped bass fishing. And sculpting some new pieces.

Speaking of fish my wife and I visited the nautical mile in Freeport, NY recently to get some seafood for a cioppino recipe I wanted to make.

We always go to Capt. Ben's.

Capt. Ben's also sells this wonderful flavored Italian bread! We usually end up eating half of it on the ride home! That's me bread in hand hamming it up.

The cioppino came out pretty good! The recipe called for mussels but since I'm the only one who eats them I left them out.

It had halibut, shrimp, scallops and Little neck clams in it.

Seeing Light At The End Of The Tunnel

I'm pleased to say I'm approaching the finish line on my Skull Island cavern project.

One of the remaining tasks to complete was creating some loose rocks for the interior.

Whenever I'm working with Apoxie clay, mache or wood putty I will always make up rocks with any surplus material.

The collection of these rocks in the above photo on the left are textured to look like marine rocks. The batch to the right are more like ordinary rocks. Sometimes I'll add a stick into the rock as a handle for when it comes time to paint them. For my skull island rocks I cobbled together a few of these leftovers, added some carved styrofoam and finished molding them with Apoxie Sculpt clay.

By modeling these rocks by hand using the same technique to texture the clay that I had on the cavern I achieved a good match.

Here are the finished rocks painted and sprayed with Dullcote.

I thought I'd celebrate nearing completion on this project by having a nice seafood dinner!

After picking my wife up at work we drove to the nautical mile in Freeport.

The Nautical Mile Fish Markets

My favorite fish market on the mile is Capt. Ben's. While there I bought some salmon fillets, shrimp and a dozen Little Neck clams.

For our dinner I made salmon cakes, spaghetti with white clam sauce and garlic shrimp. My wife made a green salad and a toasted garlic bread with melted mozzarella cheese. That bread was soooo good!