Ghost Horse!

[furtech]

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!