It's a world of laughter, a world of crafts...

For those of you reading this blog besides my family (yeah, you two know who you are), I should tell you that my daughter used to have a Small World room. It's being slowly changed to a Princess Room now, but once upon a time it was small world. My wife and I had gathered quite a few Small World things, and with just a little bit of paint and craft stuff from Michael's we were able to kinda theme her whole room. It was an apartment so most of my really elaborate ideas were not possible (no painting the walls except for one colored accent wall). One idea I did have though was to recreate the big smiling clock face from the attraction. Here he is below... It really wasn't as hard as you would think. Somewhere online I found the clockface all drawn out in a front view. I think it was taken from blueprints because the proportions looked dead on. I used this to plan everything out. Down at Home Depot I bought a prefinished white laminate disc. I didn't plan for it to be finished like this- I just figured I'd by a round piece of wood, but this worked out great. At Michael's (local craft store) I found some little paper mache round boxes for the eyes and cheeks (see the second picture below) as well as lots of doweling and wooden spheres, and of course the secret to any Small World decor- lots and lots of glitter.

Above can see here the circle piece and the two simple pieces I cut out of playwood to form the face (and a bit of my sock at the bottom there!)
Here's the main shapes just sitting in place to get the idea. I really didn't document this process as thouroughly as I could have, but you can see below, I've painted the nose, and the gold portions around the eye.

Here not only have I screwed the top layer down (and attached that nose too, though I don't remember how- probably through the back), but I've also used some thin gold braid (from the fabric section of Michael's) to border the eye gold and the triangle. The braid stands in for the raised metal that is used on the real clockface, and I don't believe it actually is on the bottom of the triangle, but I thought it helped defind the space better and mask off the gold eye paint.

Ok, here's where I skipped a lot of steps. I used bigger gold braid for the mouth (again, standing in for metal) and placed the now painted gold circle boxes over the ends, then hot glued them in place. On top of these I used the doweling and wooden sphere's to make the little sunburst shapes that go over the cheeks, glued those down, and glued a wooden button covered in silver glitter on that. The eyes were constructed similarly: The box was glued on open side up and I made a different starburst of 1 sphere surrounded by doweling (mine only has 6 spines, the real one has many more. Looks like they used a small wheel of some sort). The scrollwork on the triangle is all thin braid glued into place. The shape under the chin is a wooden button with glitter again and the shape on the traingle is a piece of glittered foam. All in all I was very happy with this. The room overall was not all it could be but little things we did like this made it neat. I even put a picture hangar on the back at an angle so that the clock is perpetually tilted mid-tick. Now if someone can just tell me a good way to get it to rotate back and forth. Now that the Princess room is going in, I've salvaged it for myself.

Yeah, we wrote these lousy lyrics...

Wendell is one example of a final Animatronic figure (below) that I don't think matched the Marc Davis art very closely. The face matches, but to me, the Marc Davis art shows a stockier Wendell, while the Animatronic seem's slenderer especially around the neck, which to me changes the whole look of the face. I tried to match the art exactly, except that I gave my sculpture the mandolin of the final figure as opposed to the banjo that Davis drew him with.

I wasn't entirely happy with his face; like Henry there were some big symmetry problems. I was happy with how well I was able to match the posture of Davis' art- that arched back as Wendell hits some horrible off key note. This was the last Country Bear I sculpted. Like I mentioned on a previous post, each bear got a bit bigger each time. Wendell wasn't bigger than Trixie, but he was bigger in scale than he should have been. I figured it was time to take a break before I did another, perhaps find one from this set that I was happy with and then redo the others and new ones to match that scale. But as it happens, life gets in the way. I'd love to get back to this project some day though. And of course then there's America Sings...

Tears will be the chaser for her wine

This was the first one where I really relied on the Marc Davis artwork. Even though Trixie is basically a big lump, the way her arms are postitioned and the subtle tilt of her head are perfect here, and something that would go unnoticed on the actual Animatronics figure. The main thing I changed was the position of her feet, cause I liked the way the Animatronic kind of rocked back and forth on her box and kicked her feet a bit. Like I said, this is my favorite of the 4 that I did. Don't know why, there's just something about it I really like.

The End

Until tomorrow's entry that is.

Howdy Folks!

The second Country Bear I tried to sculpt was Henry, the host of the show. Like Big Al, I relied a bit more on photos than the Marc Davis art for this one. Specifically, I noticed that Henry has a particular posture I wanted to capture, kind of leaning forward on his seat. The animatronic figure also has a very well defined shape, as opposed to some of the others which tend to kind of be furry lumps. I got the body shape pretty well, though the face has some symmetry problems, little stuff that wasn't really noticeable until I had finally painted it. The most frustrating thing though is that his scale is out of proportion with Big Al's. In fact each subsequent Bear I did was bigger than the last. I think this was an unfortunate effect of putting more and more care into each figure- the more detail I added, the more clay it took to achieve and in my enthusiasm I wasn't paying attention to the sizes. I meant to remedy this and actually made a second Henry, but he met with an unfortunate accident before he could be painted. Oh well. Below are the pictures of the first Henry.

Ya'll come back tomorrow for that special treat out of Tampa. A little bit of ever loving cuddlesome fluff, our own Trixie! She's the one I'm most proud of. See ya'll real soon!

There... was... BLOOD on the saddle....

About 8 years ago I decided that I wanted to try sculpting the characters from the Country Bear Jamboree. How hard could that be? Mind you I had no real sculpting experience, just a class or two in high school, and when I say class, I mean there was an hour where they let me play with some clay and simple tools- instruction was really not part of the process. Anyway, I had always loved seeing pictures of small maquettes and the beautifully sculpted larger than life characters in this Disneyland attraction seemed like the perfect subject to try my hand at.

The first one I decided to tackle was Big Al. For reference I used the above piece of Marc Davis art and lots of photos of the final Audio-Animatronics figure. All I used was some simple white clay that I bought at a craft store, toothpicks to sculpt some of the smaller details and acrylic craft paint.

I was so happy with this sculpture- like all art, it's just so satisfying to take something that's just an idea in your head and see it through, in this case to a fully dimensional object. In retrospect, it's far from perfect. I sculpted the way I painted back then- I was more about the overall impression than the fine details, so things are lumpy and rough and not as refined as they could be. But the overall sculpture had the pose and personality that I liked- and keep in mind he's just under 3 inches tall. What's even better is that as I did each subsequent bear they got bigger and bigger, so Big Al ironically ended up being the smallest. Stay tuned and I'll post the 3 other Country Bears that I sculpted. See you real soon!