Finishing Up the Miniature Skull Island Trees

I thought I'd post some photographs of my finishing work on the miniature Skull Island tree project. The palm trees are about 26" high while the other trees are roughly 20" tall.

 I sacrificed the log from my spider pit scene to create the armature for this tree trunk :    http://blacknick-sculpture.blogspot.com/2011/10/kong-spider-pit-finished.html 

                       Here I'm wrapping the wire with cotton twine to build up the limbs.

                              Adding cotton & liquid latex to the tree limb.

                                   The first coat of acrylic on the large tree.

                                      The finished tree decked out with foliage.

                                               The smaller of the two trees.

                                                  The two finished palm trees.

 Since the trees are destined for a King Kong set for a stop motion film I thought it would be fun to photograph them in B&W to see how they'd look.

It was a fun project but I'll probably be sweeping and vacuuming up moss for the next month!

The Skull Island Altar

One of my favorite scenes in King Kong (1933) is Kong looming over the sacrificial altar to claim his "bride".

I recently had the opportunity to recreate this altar in miniature. The miniature was going to be used in a stop motion prequel to King Kong by animator Eric Kessler.

He supplied me with the altar he had made and asked me to make it match the miniature Skull Island wall I had worked on.

The first thing I decided to do was to enlarge the altar by adding Styrofoam to the sides.

The Skull Island Wall in Miniature

I recently had the opportunity to recreate the look of the gates and wall of Skull Island from the classic film King Kong (1933).

Film maker Eric Kessler had made the wall out of plywood. Now he wanted me to give it a stone like appearance.

I knew from our conversation that the wall was 6 feet long. But when he arrived at my studio with his wall in tow it took over my work space! Here is a photo of the wall and gate before work began on it.

The Completed Styracosaurus Sculpture

Working on the Styracosaurus was enjoyable. It was an interesting challenge to sculpt something that had to have movable parts for stop motion animation. Eric Kessler has since completed filming the sequence where the raptors are feeding on the dead Styracosaur.

He was kind enough to give me a sneak preview and the scene came out great! It isn't often I get to see one of my creations come to life in a film. What made it even more exciting for a Kong fan like me was it is featured in a stop motion King Kong film.

If you haven't seen any of Kessler's animation of Kong and the other inhabitants of Skull Island you should check out his work on Youtube. Here is a link to one of my favorite clips:YouTube - Kong vs. Pack of Raptors

Styracosaurus Sculpture

Using Super Sculpey polymer clay I roughed out the general size of the Styracosaur. The stop motion raptors that appear in Eric Kessler's King Kong prequel are going to be feeding on the thigh area.

Once Kessler gave the green light on the pose I stripped the armature of the Super Sculpey and prepared to begin the sculpture in Aves Apoxie Sculpt clay.

Sculpting an Apoxie Clay Styracosaurus For a King Kong Film

After completing several stop motion native puppets for his King Kong prequel Eric Kessler asked me if I would be able to sculpt him a plant eating dinosaur that could be made to have a movable neck and jaw. In his film the plant eater was to be the victim of an attack by Raptors.

It sounded like an interesting project and being a rabid fan of the original 1933 version of King Kong I jumped at the chance! While discussing the size and type of dinosaur that the Raptors would be preying on we decided to go with a Styracosaurus. Its nasal horn and head ornamentation would make it an interesting subject.

Kessler provided me with photographs and measurements of his stop motion Raptor puppets so I could design the Styracosaur to be on a similar scale. The first step was locating good reference material. I based most of my Styrac measurements on the skeletal drawings of Gregory Paul :The Official Website of Gregory S. Paul - Paleoartist, Author and Scientist

Next I began to make an armature for the sculpture. Using aluminum wire I roughed out the backbone and pelvis of the dinosaur. I drilled a hole where the hip joint would meet the thighs and glued a brass tube in place. Here is a picture of the start of the armature.