Halloween Weirdos

Some people have been telling me for years to make a YouTube Halloween video, and this year I finally made one. I spent a week on the project, and used mostly older puppets, but a few unused ones snuck in there too. Here's the video:




But I managed to make two new puppets. Here's the first one.

This is actually a quite old latex cast I found in one of my stashes of stuff-I-should-throw-away-but-never-does. Originally it was supposed to be a Mewlip (featured in my Mewlips video), but I decided to go in another direction with these creatures and discarded this design. However, I had already cast this latex skin and added the two reflective bead eyes. Since the skin was in good shape despite the years (latex will, as you know, start to crumble after some time) I decided to use it for one of my new Halloween puppets. I added sheets of polyurethane foam on the inside of the skin, using liquid latex as a bonding agent, to bulk it up a bit.

I also bulked up the aluminum wire armature with some foam wrappings. Cotton and latex was used to build up muscles on the lanky arms, and a pair of latex wings were attached to the back of the armature. You can see the whole wing-making process HERE.

Here the puppet has been given a skin made from patches of latex skin cast in plaster molds. The nails are made from thick paper dipped in latex.

And here's the finished puppet. I also placed a wing nut in the puppet's posterior, so I can attach a flying rig.

Here's the second original puppet in this video. It's a lanky, pot-bellied zombie with a slightly (or maybe very) cartoony look. Like with the other puppet I had already sculpted the torso and created a mold for it. I can't actually remember what I made the sculpture for, but I thought it would fit right in here, and it did. As you can hopefully see in this photo the cast latex skin has been padded with thin sheets of polyurethane, and the armature has also been padded in the same way. Also, this guy has a wing nut in his butt.
These two puppets are very simply and quickly made, but perfectly functional in every way. What cuts down the construction time in this case is that none of the puppets have articulated faces. No rotating eyes or jointed jaws.

The finished goofy zombie. Both these guys flut past the camera so quickly it'd be a waste to just use them once. No idea what the future holds, but I'm sure you haven't seen the last of them.

Halloween Nasties!

So what the heck have I've been up to during September and October?? Well, not blogging or making anything to blog about; that's for sure. For these past two months I've been building stuff for a local Halloween show, and it took me a bit longer than I had anticipated. Here's a quick rogue's gallery of some of that work.

This is a "Myling", a child ghost eager to exact his revenge on those who ended his short life, most likely his own mother -a young woman who didn't want this responsibility early in life. This tiny specter from Swedish rural folklore was made from a store-bought rubber baby doll. I changed its face using epoxy and gave the doll a new paint job.

The poop monster, created by building up latex and cotton over bits of urethane foam. The puppet is about a foot and a half, and is supposed to sit on an old chamber pot in the final exhibition.

The man-eater monster; a companion to the poop monster and about as large. The body has an aluminum wire armature covered with fake fur and a cotton/latex mix. The teeth are cast in latex and the eyes are flat glass blobs with a painted backside. Cheap and simple stuff!

Three ghostly heads built up with latex and cotton over plastic skulls and cardboard. In the exhibition they'll be suspended from the ceiling and have flimsy bodies made from torn fabrics.

A werewolf in mid-transformation. It's a hollow latex mask covered with fake fur and crepé hair, that is pulled over the head of a mannequin. I also made a deformed hairy hand.

This is the biggest piece I created for this project; the Galloping Sow. This folkloric monstrosity is a supernatural pig with back bristles that are long and sharp enough to cut you in half when she runs between your legs. She haunts graveyards and crossroads at night. This model is a modified plastic wild boar garden decoration. I built a new face for it out of epoxy, added the rows of teats under her belly, and the back spikes, and inserted small lights in the eyes. A new paint job finished off the whole thing.

Now I'm hoping to get back to my scheduled programming of making smaller monsters for the great YouTubian void.