Brown Jenkin Comes Alive

Last fall I got in touch with Jennifer, who has the YouTube channel RavenOfPoe. She creates little videos with philosophical musings, poetry readings and quotes. She did a terrific reading of a part of H P Lovecraft's short story "The Dreams in the Witch House". The part in question describes "Brown Jenkin"; a rat with a human head and a witches familliar. I thought her reading was so good I asked if I could use it for a short-short video project on the subject. She gladly agreed and I went off to my workshop to produce the Jenkin puppet. A couple of months ago I shot scenes with a friend of mine acting out the angst of Walter Gilman, the unlycky hero of the story. Last weekend I shot the last live-action scenes with a witch puppet and some background footage, so it's time to put this one together.

Which means I have no moving images to show yet, but I do have a pretty thorough documentation of the making of the Brown Jenkin puppet. As always I started off with a sculpture of the head. If you get the head right, the rest follows quite easily.

First I cast a stiff latex head skin and attached it to the aluminum wire/friendly plastic armature. My intention at the beginning was to not show very much of Jenkin apart from something quick-moving. But of course while working with the character I fell in love with him and wanted a better-looking head.

This meant I would finally cast my luck into the silicone pond. A make-up artist friend of mine recommended PlatSil Gel 10 to me and I bought a set from Mapont in Sweden. This silicone can probably be found from a number of retailers in the US, the UK and other countries. One place I know of and can recommend is Bity Mold Supply. Mitch, who runs the store, also has a very cool YouTube channel, where he shows how to use many of his products. As you can see, the finished silicone skin is very flexible. I added some Silc Pig red and flesh tint from SmoothOn.com while mixing the two-part silicone. Ideally, I would've added some red flocking but that wasn't available when I bought the silicone.

The head armature for this puppet turned out very simple in the end. I chose to add just two moving sections; an aluminum wire to animate the nose/upper lip and a jointed jaw.

The silicone face was attached to the head armature using Sil-Poxy silicone glue. This stuff also comes from SmoothOn and will stick silicone to absolutely everything.

Sil-Poxy takes about 10 minutes or so to do its work properly. The question was how to keep the silicone face pressed against the armature without having to sit and press on it with my fingers. The simple solution was to hold the face in place with some bits of thick aluminum wire.

Here's the face attached to the armature. As you can see I've also started to add some pieces of upholstery foam to the body.

There was no need for any accurate reconstruction of muscle patterns. Just some basic stuff, so I would know that I was on the right track shaping the body while adding the fur later. The tail and the feet were simply wrapped with thin string and dipped in flesh-tinted latex.

Claws are sometimes a bit of a bother since it's hard to get them to stick properly to the fingers. The best solution seems to be to make them out of the same material as the fingers, in this case latex. I cut out claw shapes in thin cardboard and dipped them in latex tinted black.

The latex-covered paper claws are then simply attached to the fingers with some un-tinted latex. They are quite flexible and very durable, and always maintain their original shape.

I've started adding the fur. So far it's just about gluing down pieces of fake fur. But for the legs and the face I had to add small clups of hair, glued down with latex or silicone glue.

Here's the Sil-Poxy again. When using this to add hair to the silicone face I scraped up a tiny amount of glue on a dental tool.

A small clump of fur was cut off the fake fur fabric.

The Sil-Poxy was smeared onto the face.

The clump of fur was pressed down onto the face and a tiny amount of Sil-Poxy was added on top of the hair ends.

Here's the finished result. Since Sil-Poxy is transparent it won't really show up that much despite being a bit shiny. If you add it thinly it's even less obvious and you don't have to add that much, since its bond is super strong.

Time to paint the little bugger. Which means it's time for some more SmoothOn product placement. Their Psycho Paint is designed to be used on any platinum silicone, which means that it will stick to PlatSil Gel 10 as well. You mix the two Psycho Paint components with whatever tinting you find workable. I used SmoothOn's Silc Pic pigments.

When thinned with Toulene you can put the Psycho Paint mix through your airbrush, though I didn't have the guts to try that out this time. It wasn't necessary either, since the puppet's face only needed some minor touch-ups.

And here's the finished paint job.

The fur on the legs was stuck on with latex. The process is very simple, with overlapping layers. You just have to remember which end is the right one to start at.

The finished fur covering on a leg. The latex bond is very strong and should a shiny surface appear from it, just dab it with some baby powder or transparent make-up powder.

The finished Mr Jenkin. Hopefully, you'll se him wriggling about on a YouTube screen near you quite soon. Lastly; a quick description of the creature by Lovecraft himself:
"Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch's blood, which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages."

Some More YouTube Stuff.

Those of you who have looked through my blog will already have seen posts on this stuff, but I decided to make a couple of image streams for YouTube on the subjects. They might be of interest, as they include video footage of the finished puppets and props at work. So, enjoy!

Goblin Wood Behind the Scenes (of a sort).

Some more YouTube stuff. These two little documentaries were made for the DVD, so Angelica could show them to her class. They are made to be watched by a 10 year old audience and therefore very simple. But I hope you'll find something in them to enjoy anyway.

Goblin Wood Film Up!

After finishing the DVDs for the folks involved in the film I posted it on YouTube (HERE). Still NOT happy with how YouTube compresses videos. The image quality when using HQ is fine, but the flow of the video appears disrupted and choppy. I can't have both good image and movement, apparently, though some YouTubers appear to have solved that problem. However, using their exact settings for compression doesn't solve mine. The web is weird.

Bilbo Baggins Figurine

I love sculpting characters using my favorite clay in the Universe; Chavant. Mostly, my sculptures end up as puppets or masks, but I have also done sculptures that are cast as plastic figurines. For the past three months I've been really busy finishing films for both myself and others, plus I've been doing some art for books. But I decided to spend ten minutes every morning right before I go to work on creating a sculpture, made for no other redeeming reason except that it's fun to just do it. I decided to try my hand at one of my favorite characters ever; Mr Bilbo Baggins, hero of J R R Tolkien's "The Hobbit". I think the moment that best sums up Hobbit life is when Bilbo steps out to smoke his enormous pipe right in the beginning of chapter one ("early one morning in the quiet of the world"). He hears someone (Gandalf) coming up the path beside his Hobbit hole and starts to turn his head.

This sculpture was going to be quite small, but still needed some support. I made this very simple frame using tin wire and a plastic bottle cap.

The humble beginnings of Mr Baggins. I soften the Chavant with a heat gun and just slap it on to form a basic shape.

I was pretty sure I had taken a couple of photos of the sculpture in the middle stages of its creation. Obviously it wasn't so, so we'll skip right to the finished version. I added a clay pipe just for fun. It wasn't a part of the finished casting.

Here's a bunch of photos showing how the silicone mold was cast. I used DragonSkin Q from SmoothOn Inc. First I sponged on a very thin layer, just to get rid of air bubbles. I then built up a Chavant clay wall around the base, then pouring in silicone and letting it seek its level. Then the clay wall went up a little futher with more silicone, and on and on until the sculpture was covered. This way I was able to make a very sturdy, yet not overly thick, silicone mold. In the last two images you can see the clay wall removed and then the sculpture dismantled and taken out. I had to cut the mold in the back a bit using a hobby knife. I also cut the space between Bilbo's legs inside the mold in order to get the support frame out.

SmoothCast 325 (also from SmoothOn) was poured into the mold. To the right; the casting just after it came out of the mold.

The finished Bilbo figurine. The pipe was made by softening Friendly Plastic and rolling it into a long tube, then shaping it. The head of the pipe was made out of Apoxie sculpt. But if I start making any copies I'll make a pipe head that can be cast instead. The figurine was painted with acrylic airbrush colors. In some areas I painted on the color with a brush.
I think this turned out quite well. Bilbo is 13 cm tall. You see, the plan is now to go on doing some other characters from the book; Gandalf, Thorin, Gollum, the Great Goblin and so on. Making Bilbo this size will allow me to make many of the other characters in scale, ending with Beorn. The Trolls and Smaug, if I ever make them, will have to be in a scale of their own.
It seems my mornings will be booked for a while ahead. Roll on Gandalf..

Goblin Wood Trailer

I made this little trailer last night for my friends who helped me make this film. As of yet, they've seen naught from the post-production except stills. Hopefully I'll get the finished film up pretty soon. Still have some intricate soundwork to do.

I'm pretty disappointed with how my vids turn out on YouTube. They're often blurry and "jumpy". My animation often looks like crap, which bothers me more than anything else. I'll seek counsel with one of my mates, who's a lot more successful with his uploads. So the linked-in version you can see here is quite shitty. Go to the trailer on YouTube instead and see if you have the "HQ" button in the lower right corner of the YouTube viewscreen. Click that and the film will at least look decent.

Making of "Dagon" Monster Mask

A couple of years ago I was sort of planning to do an amateur film version of H P Lovecraft’s short story “Dagon”. The plan was to film it down the very south of Sweden, where incredibly tall, dark cliffs rise up from the sea, creating cathedral-like coves. It went as far as me doing a sculpture for a mask of the head of the creature rising up from the depths at the end of the story. I also made a plaster mold from the sculpture. The intention here was to create a monster suit, reaching from the waist up. Usually I do all my monsters as animated puppets, but I’m also unashamedly fond of Japanese monster movies, so… But the actual mask was never cast. I did that recently, just to finish it and see how it turned out.

But starting at the beginning (in my old home, even) I did the mask sculpture in Chavant clay during weekday nights. It took about one week to finish it and I made the mold the following weekend.

The tool I use most often is a loop tool I made myself. It’s quite small and allows you to get in close and add pretty small details. I have an even smaller one for sculpting my stop-motion puppets.

I decided the sculpture was finished at this stage. I tried to make a creature that would look organic, evil and amphibious. I also wanted him to display some character the short moments he would be visible on film.

Just some more shots from the side and the back. The bumps along the sides and the back of his neck are the basis of spines that will be created separately and added to the finished mask.

Here the sculpture is reclining on a table, cushioned by upholstery foam in a plastic bag. I’ve build up a wall from blocks of wood around the head. Clay will be added around the sculpture to create a dividing wall, allowing me to make a two-part plaster mold. The wood blocks will add support to the clay.

The dividing clay wall has been added. If you look closely you’ll notice square pieces of clay sticking up along the wall. Those are clay keys that will create notches that will help line up and interlock the two pieces of the finished mold.

Time to create the actual mold. I always use Ultracal 30, a very hard plaster that replicates great detail. The first coat of plaster, the so-called “splash coat”, is brushed on in order to eliminate air bubbles. Then another, thicker coat of plaster is added. Burlap soaked in plaster is then put over that as reinforcement, and finally a last layer of plaster to smooth it out.

The front half of the mold is finished. Time to turn it over and do the backside (this thing is already weighing a ton!)

Looking at the mold from this perspective it’s easy to see those key notches I was talking about. What happens now is that another clay wall goes up and the exposed parts of the plaster mold is covered in a thin coat of Vaseline, working as a release agent.

As you can see there are new lumps of clay along the insides of the mold. They are there to provide small holes along the edge of the mold, where I can insert screwdrivers to pry the mold open and separate the two mold halves.

Now the whole sculpture is encased in a huge plaster mold. When the plaster has set it’s time to pry the mold open using those screwdrivers I mentioned (you can see one lying in the bottom right corner.) This part of the work usually entails a lot of grunting, swearing and sweating, so let’s skip that, shall we?

The two mold halves are separated (though only one is shown here.) The clay from the sculpture is still in the mold, but that will soon be removed and the mold halves cleaned up for the casting of latex. I got rid of the clay as soon as I could and clamped the mold halves together. If I hadn’t the halves would probably have warped a bit while the water evaporated from the plaster. A good thing I did that, since it would take another two years before actually using the mold!

Here’s the first latex casting, with fin-like appendages added along the neck. They were created with thin sheets of latex strung between spines made out of latex-soaked cotton. The “beard” was also done with cotton and latex.

Here’s the finished mask, base-painted with PAX paint and finished with acrylic airbrush paints. A coat of clear gloss lacquer was added over the eyes. There are actually very small holes in the folds and wrinkles around his nose and eyes, which you can look out through. You still have very limited vision, but this character was never meant to move about much. Maybe someday my “Dagon” adaptation will see the light of day and the mask will be joined with the rest of this monster’s body. Stay tuned…