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Ghost Horse!
Full Flickr Set Here
This year our masquerade group, AGSMA (Anything Goes School of Masquerade Arts) entered the San Diego ComiCon masquerade with a presentation based on the video game, Muramasa. The skit came off wonderfully and my part in it was the ghostly, demon-horse that the demon warrioress rides on. The road leading up to that point was a drama-fraught trip for me (including a week and a half of 20hr days, sleepless stretches of forty or more hours and the possibility that my piece wouldn't have been finished in time...). I actually left for San Diego at 7am Saturday. Uffda.
(I'll post the fun with AGSMA and SDCC in a subsequent post.)
Still, I'm very pleased with the final result. I was very excited at the prospect of making a life-size, skeletal horse. The challenges it offered were many-fold: sculpting all the bones, the engineering to design the horse so that it could be "ridden" by an adult female and the need for this to look other-worldly.
I bought a "Visible Horse" model and used that skeleton to carve the bones from. This project used more math than any I've ever done in order to scale-up the tiny skeleton model into a full-sized horse. The bones are carved out of styrofoam (a drywall saw was used for 90% of the carving) and covered with Fantasy Film , an amazing material from a company called Art Glitter. . The people at Art Glitter were -really- nice to me. Check them out if you ever need materials that glitter or sparkle-- they have some items you can't find anywhere else and which have amazing properties!
I highly recommend this material to anyone needing a semi-rigid, irridescent material. Fantasy Film starts off as a flimsy mylar-like sheet. You cover the item (or create a frame for fairy wings) and use a heat gun to heat the material. The FF then shinks and stretches and the colors explode. I used primarily opalescent, greens and blues, but they have all the colors you could want (yellows, reds, etc.). Check them out!
I'll make a post about how this beast was constructed, but here's the final result! I'm pretty happy with him: we operated him Bunraku-style (Japanese puppetry) and I got the hoped-for effect from the spot-lights hitting the Fantasy Film: the demon horse looked like it was a skeleton made from opal.
Oh, and I love how he travels: I got the entire horse skeleton and supporting structures into my Prius! I love my car!
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Man, and you wonder why I stopped competing?
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And the fact that I also happen to be working on a Muramasa costume at the moment is just a little ironic... ^^;;;
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I have no idea why you stopped competing: your a great suit-builder (terrific expressions!) and twice the performer that I am (and that's giving me probably a little too high a rating). And performance is what seals the deal.
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I have extra rolls of the stuff I used (Fantasy Film)-- I want to send you some of them to play with. Email me (my-user-name at gmail dot com) and I'll send them up to you.
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-J
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gjeqx76Ndpw
Horsey bones came out awesome!
And you totally could have taken that extra fabric looking at that load.
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*They test gags on me to see if people generally would get it
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Funny, my last nightmare/triumph project was also a horse. I have 3 discarded heads, and a pair of unused body shells from the 2 months slog with an increasingly...complex client.
I will be recycling one of the 'failed' heads as our camp marker at BurningMan, then probably tossing it into the fire to cleanse any unwanted karma and let the project finally rest in peace :D
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