Duckon

We recently got back from Duckon.  There were some very entertaining activities at the Con such as the singing Tesla coils and a birds of prey presentation. The eagle owl was very impressive, and big. As for the singing Tesla coils here is a video from last year when they only had one. This year there were two and a guy in a metal suit.

On a weird note I also had my first theft/very discounted sale at the show. From what I can tell someone hit the booth at night while the dealers room was closed and left with most of my cute cast stone vampire bats. The same person or perhaps someone else left $10 in one of my small boxes. They may have also taken a platypus. I didn't really notice until this morning when one of my roommates wanted one of the brown bats for watching the cat, and I could not find any of them. So, I did inventory and noticed an odd pattern. 

The dragon had an accident involving a cat and a hot room. I'm going to have to perform surgery to get the armature back into place, fortunately I did not lose or damage the head. I should be posting about the small cast animals and other new things soon.  Also, I will be attempting to do the Convergence (the small sci fi con not the giant goth con) artshow. I'm also entering the lottery for the Windycon dealers room. Grace will not be doing Convergence.

The Dragon is taking a bit longer then expected. I think I'm looking at well over two hundred hours if not over three hundred.  I'm nervous to put forth another expected finish date, as this has been one of the more ambitious projects I've taken on. I will post updates here as I go and hopefully it will be ready to cast some time this summer.  I thought I would go ahead and put up some of the early progress shots.

I started off by cutting a six by six inch wax base and building a thick gauge steel wire armature. Here is a shot of the initial armature with a nickel for scale.  This turned out not to be enough support, after I got most of the wax on.  I've not worked this large in wax before and it supports itself less well then I expected it to. I think I was expecting it to act like greenware ceramic, when the wax was cold.

After I got the armature together I covered it in victory brown wax, causing it to look a bit like an undead chicken. Given recent events I'm glad I went with wax over sculpey in this case, as I'm intending to cast this guy in the platinum-based silicone rather then tin. The reason for the platinum is the shelf life, tin-based silicone gets funny and fragile after a couple of years and as detail is going to be very important with this mold I would like something that will not be prone to losing bits as it gets older.

Once I'd added about 8 pounds of wax I started to have a balance problem. I didn't have the wings on yet to create counter balance so the dragon got really top heavy. I tried adding an additional external support, this did well when it was not being worked on. I needed something  larger to stabilize it while I was working.

In the end I grabbed an old lazy Susan and drilled a one inch hole in it. I then bolted a large treaded rod to it to create a back iron. I liked the idea of a reusing this device as a back iron for other large pieces, so I decided to make the horizontal bar adjustable. I got some cast metal electrical clamps that had threading running horizontally. Next time I will just want to work the back iron into the initial armature.  I think that will be a lot stronger if it is solidly attached, but it was a little late to do that with this dragon. Here is a close up of the adjustable horizontal bar.

Once, the dragon was nicely stable I started adding finer muscle structure. I added the taxidermy eyes as I would then know what size I needed for the casts. It is also really nice to have the eyeballs difficult to damage while you are working on the lids. This applies to claws and teeth as well, though I did not add pre-harden claws and teeth in this case.

Most of my time so far has been in the detailing. It has been about ten percent building up the form and ninety percent detailing.  This is generally not the case with most sculptures. I blame the scales, so many scales.  I will likely be working on this guy at the next convention, which will be Duckon.

Capricon

This last weekend we had a table Capricon in Arlington Heights, our second science fiction convention as Necropolis Studios. Capricon was extremely well organized; they even had the room parties in the convention booklet, a daily 2 page newsletter about all of the activities that were happening last minute, and they provided food for all of the dealers. It was also the most themed con I had ever been to. The theme was pirates and you could pretty much do pirate related things every moment of the convention if you chose to.

Thing went reasonably well at the booth, we learned quite a bit and have a lot ideas about a new booth set up. We also upset our first person, apparently someone mistook "necropolis" for "necrophilia" and was unhappy we would name our studio after such an awful thing. One of the other dealers let us know as they thought it was pretty funny, we thought it was pretty funny as well. A man named David with interesting eyebrows came by and took our pictures, which he then emailed to us, which was very nice of him. We got quite a bit of art done at the con, Grace seems to be getting over her dry spell. I was working on a large dragon that I'm hoping to get casts of in April.

Here is a shot of me working on the Dragon:


Here is a shot of Grace drawing "Wearing My Nonsense Hat Again":


Here are a few pictures Grace drew at the con: