Kong Bust Completed

I thought I'd share a few of the wip photos of creating the cart that the Kong bust will be mounted on.

 Here I'm scoring the Apoxie clay to look like rough hewn lumber

I visited quite a few hobby shops but couldn't find proper size wheels for my cart. I ended up sculpting a wheel, made a mold and casted the set I'd use. 

                                                           The finished cart curing .

                                          Dry brushing the grain of the cart to look like wood.

                                          Aluminum mounting pegs for the Kong bust being fitted to the cart.

                                                               The finished cart.

                                        B&W photo of the sculpture mounted on the cart base.

                                                          Kong chomping on a native.

Now that Kong is finished I'm going to be redesigning my spider pit stop motion puppets. First up is my tentacle creature.

Here I'm beginning to strip off its latex skin as the spider & crab puppet square off in the background.

Spider Pit Article in The Prehistoric Times

Welcome to the new followers of my blog! I wanted to give a heads up about an article I wrote about creating a diorama of the King Kong spider pit and its denizens. It appears in the current issue (# 101 ) of The Prehistoric Times : http://www.prehistorictimes.com/

I'm in the process of designing a new creature that will be residing in the pit shortly. Check back for updates!

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.