day of the dead masks circus parade commission

    

in the making

     

found a wooden CD rack, jumped on it a little, broke it up a bit, and then a bit more. afterwards stitched some strongly discoloured, or should I say stained, piece of old lace - found in some gutter or other - around the wooden skeleton, then spined all the lacey ribs together with good old handy wire. that's a body, or is it a fish? or just plain old skin and bones, whatever it is it's bound to have personality - and in this case, by the looks of things, a bad one - if you give it a face, so that's exactly what I did: with big juicy bubba lips; a bit of ken doll mutilation to make some little piranha fangs; then a kind of saucy kind of scary looking one-eye I borrowed off a wonky looking rocking horse. e voila. but the pictures aren't really good enough to make him out in any kind of glory and I no longer have him in my possession, which is a shame. sad-one-eyed-fish-face @(

The ever-so-naughty Boggle and friends....

        jim (poor lad) looking forlorn as ever                  Barbara the horse (above) what a legend!

These are a few examples of the works I made for a recent commission for a great kids theatre show by Lawrence Speck called 'The Boggle'. It was emotional to let Jim and Phillip Russel leave as I had such a good time making them and grew rather attached! Admittedly it was better to see them in action and their northern farmer-ish accents really brought them to life. I spose it's like they say: if you love them let them go.

here's Lawrence as the naughty Boggle himself with one of my props and the set I co-created.

giving birth to something

just trying to sort through all of the masses of pics I have clogging up my computer and came across these from my degree work that I havn't included anywhere, looking at this face again makes me realise she actually looked a little bit like she's going for a poo, but I suppose she's supposed to be giving birth so I wasn't that far off...... :s

a bit of homemaking......

I've had so much fun putting together the cottage, if I were small enough I would definitely move in, at first I thought cardboard wouldn't be sufficient to get the details I wanted but it has really turned out better than I expected, the nature of the structure even means that it's quite strong as well.

 I think the idea is that the cottage will be lit up for parts of the show so I've tried it out with a lamp inside just to get an idea........

mr Russel and his weather beaten mush

seeing as I imagine him as a bit of a boozed up, drunken old farmer I had to apply a rosy glow to Jim's dad's face and the wiry brillow beard has finished off his rugged face nicely or kind of scarily with those wandering boss-eyes.  Poor old Philip.