Spider Pit Ravine WIP Photos

I've been chipping away at getting my spider pit ravine finished but it has been slow going. The weather has been constantly rainy, humid and foggy for the last week.

Because of this the rock work I am doing on the ravine walls is taking forever to dry! The picture below is the wood and hardware cloth frame covered with mache and wood putty. I've just added a section of styrofoam board to build up the rock face.

This is the styrofoam rock face before I added my mache/wood putty mixture.

This is the rock face about 75% finished. I just have to refine the cave entrance a bit.

Here is the pit lizard stop motion puppet sitting on one of the finished boulders waiting for its final coat of paint.

WIP Skull Island Spider Pit Diorama

I thought I'd share a few work in progress photos. This past week I've been concentrating on finishing up the fallen log that bridges the spider pit chasm.

Here I am drilling a hole in the Apoxie Sculpt clay "bark" of the tree.

After drilling the holes I glued in my roots which were coat hanger wire covered in foil and then wrapped with floral wire. The floral wire helps the clay stay in place as you model it.

This is the first layer of clay. After it cures a second layer of clay will be applied which I'll texture to match the bark on the rest of the log.

Here is the snapped off top section of the log which I made by hot gluing Styrofoam over a cardboard tube. You can see the finished trunk section of the log primed grey in the background.

After using a rasp to shape the Styrofoam I coated it in wood putty.

The smaller roots of the log trunk were formed using aluminum and floral wire.

Here is the root nearing completion. It is covered in cotton and tinted liquid latex.

Next post I'll show the roots added to the log and go about painting and detailing it.

Miniature Diorama

I've been working on a several stop motion puppets based on creatures from the 1933 version of King Kong.

To showcase my puppets I decided to build a diorama. The diorama will be the bottom of a jungle ravine on Skull Island. I'm going to need a large rock. Also a portion of an old uprooted tree trunk.

To build up the tree trunk I took a cardboard tube from a roll of aluminum foil. I hot glued chunks of styrofoam to the tube and roughed out the shape of the trunk with a file.

Next I mixed a batch of Mache which I tinted with brown acrylic paint. I applied this over the styrofoam trunk with a palette knife.

I'm using Durham's Wood Putty to create the root end of the tree. After mixing up a thin mixture of it I painted the putty over the base of the tree. While this was drying I began work on the rock.

For my rock armature I filled a plastic bag with shredded paper and wrapped it with Duct tape till I got the general shape I was looking for.

Then I mixed a batch of wood putty and saturated burlap strips with it. After squeezing out the excess putty I began draping it over the armature.

After this dried I mixed up a thick batch of putty and using a palette knife applied it over the entire rock. When the putty reached a leather hard stage I carved it to create an irregular craggy surface.

When it was dry enough to be safely handled I removed the armature to facilitate drying.

I was left with a light weight, hollow putty rock. I was pleased with how the putty handled and would definitely use this material again in the future.

Next post I'll be creating the roots for the tree trunk.

Eric Kessler's King Kong Project

The last week in October Eric Kessler visited us on Long Island to pick up a project I had completed for him. It was a set I created for a stop motion film he is at work on.

Kess is an avid fan of the 1933 version of King Kong. In that classic film special effects creator Willis O'Brien brought Kong and the other creatures of Skull Island to life using stop motion animation.

Utilizing elaborate miniature sets and the most gorgeous Kong puppet I've ever seen Kess has set about to create his vision of the Kong story. In this clip on Youtube you can get an idea how labor intensive this process is : YouTube - Kong Spino & T

Here is Kess loading the last piece of the cavern set into his Jeep.

I took some B&W photos of the cavern to see how it would look.

And here are some color photos of the completed cavern.

For a Kong fan like myself it was a privilege creating this for Kess. I mean think of it -- Kong is going to be strutting his stuff through something I made! How cool is that? The icing on the cake was Kess was kind enough to give me a sneak peek of some footage he had recently completed!