Some people have asked for a look at Scrooge’s face. How’s this?
Some people have asked for a look at Scrooge’s face. How’s this?
I’m very happy with Joe Simon’s latest sculpture for Dedham Pond Designs and thought I’d give folks a preview. Do you recognize what you see?
Should be out this fall.
Television has been the focus of way, way too many hours of my life, especially given how little of that time I was actually happy. But I do recall a few times that I got something memorable out of watching TV.
One of those times was when I was probably 11 or 12 years old, and I sneaked out of my basement bedroom on a Friday night to watch “Shock Theater” on the tube. “Shock Theater” was the kind of weekly horror movie feature that apparently doesn’t exist on local stations anymore. I regularly broke my parents’ bedtime rules to watch it (they were upstairs and couldn’t hear me), and enjoyed a variety of flicks ranging from cheesy to mildly creepy. I saw the original “King Kong” on “Shock Theater”, “The Creeping Flesh”, “Trog” and many others.
It was all free, not even a monthly cable bill. We got our TV signal through an antenna on the roof and a slim wire carried it down to the basement. On the night I remember most clearly, the movie was “Night of the Living Dead”, released in 1968.
My “Shock Theater” history did not prepare me for what I was about to see. The films I’d watched Friday nights up to that point, by and large, were pretty mild, really. Lots of creepiness and effectively scary moments, but nothing over the top. I suspect that “Shock Theater” added “Night” to its rotation of movies despite its more gruesome content because it could do so for free. Even though it was less than 10 years old at that point, “Night of the Living Dead” had moved into the public domain because of the failure to include a copyright notice on the first prints of the film.
Anyway, the movie started. Black and white but not too old, which I initially took as kind of a bad sign. Jerk mocking his sister in a cemetery. “They’re coming to get you, Barbra. There’s one of them now!” Hm. OK.
But holy crap, the shambling dude with the white hair and black suit really was coming to get her.
My heart started racing about the time Bill Hinzman’s Cemetery Zombie attacked, and throttled up when he killed Johnny and chased Barbra to the isolated countryside house.
What? Why was he doing this? What did he want?
So, for the next couple hours or so, I was absorbed in the movie for a few minutes at a time. In between, I turned off the TV and went to bed, shaken. Then I’d be back five or 10 minutes later, wanting more even though I was afraid of it. “Night of the Living Dead” was unlike anything I’d ever… Read the rest
Dedham Pond Designs was created in early 2010, shortly after sculptor William Paquet first contacted me with an offer to work together on a project that turned out to be a bust called “Alma”, inspired by the effects work Dick Smith did on the 1981 movie “Ghost Story”. Here’s how I told the story:
We started discussing possible projects. I said in an e-mail that I enjoy the over-the-top ghosts I’ve seen in some movies and attached a few photos, including a collage of Smith’s work on “Ghost Story”. William, a very busy guy, read my message and replied quickly, before looking at the photos.
“Ghosts … funny you mentioned them because one of the things I have always wanted to sculpt and one of the things than came to mind for you was a bust of Alma Mobley/Eva Galli from ‘Ghost Story’. The half-rotten stunning work by Dick Smith. Very creepy, and the kind of thing that’s fun to paint.”
Attached to the e-mail was the exact same collage of Smith’s work. Oh yeah, this project had to happen.
We agreed that William would sculpt a bust inspired by actress Alice Krige’s Alma Mobley, as she appeared in a heart-stopping scene early in “Ghost Story”.
William kept me regularly updated on his progress with the Alma bust. Somewhere along the line, he said he was going to go ahead and do another sculpture inspired by the same film, this one of the ghost of Eva Galli as she appears to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in the moments before his character’s death. That scene has haunted me for years, ever since I first sat in a theater and watched it in 1981.
So, Alma would launch Dedham Pond while William would, eventually, produce Eva himself. However, lucky for me, William Paquet is a busy guy. Very, very busy. Check out some of what he’s doing for Quarantine Studio to get an idea of how busy he is.
A couple of months ago, William unexpectedly offered a deal to make Eva part of the Dedham Pond catalog. Much as she frightens me, I quickly took him up on the offer. After another masterful paint job by Charlie Coleman — whose skills have also introduced Dedham Pond’s Mr. Hyde and Nosferatu — she’s now ready to haunt hobbyists.
ORDERING INFO: Eva and Alma are both 1/4 scale, one-piece resin kits. They sell for $45 apiece plus shipping for a 1.5-pound package. The price for both is $80 plus shipping for a 2-pound package. If interested, please email todd.powell@resinbarbarian.com. Please include your ZIP code so I can figure shipping.
I recently finished building these two at work and thought I’d share them here. They’re resin castings of Ichthyornis, from a fossil dug up in western Kansas. My employer’s website says the molds were made from the most complete Ichthyornis skeleton ever found. It measures about 8 inches long. The website says these birds were probably similar to modern seagulls, except of course that gulls (like all other birds today) don’t have teeth.
To be honest, it would have been easier to build these things out of matchsticks. The molds were tiny, the castings difficult to trim and assemble. Plus, I’m a poor welder and so I had a hard time making the bases look decent.
Both are on their way to a new home at a museum in Korea.
Last summer, my wife was driving through Woodland Park, Colo., which is the city nearest where we live. Truthfully, calling Woodland Park a “city” seems like too much because it’s a small place, but it does have several grocery stores, a Taco Bell and McDonald’s … and a dinosaur museum.
Yep, a dinosaur museum. I got my first look inside the place about a year ago and was amazed by all the dinos on display, and even more amazed to realize that all those beasties were molded, cast and built right there, on the premises. I spent as many minutes as I could spare staring through the display window into the attached lab, marveling at all I could see.
Anyway, what my wife saw as she drove by was a notice that the lab was hiring a molder/caster.
I happened to have a little experience molding and casting, having recently finished molding the Dedham Pond Mr. Hyde and casting all kinds of Phantom replacement heads. I threw a few castings in a sack and headed out the next day to apply for the job. Two days later, I had been hired.
Skip to the end of December. After weeks primarily spent molding and casting dinosaur teeth and claws, interspersed with molding some more complicated things and casting a baryonyx, I was assigned to help build a crocodile. Specifically, Terminonaris, an extinct crocodilian, in cooperation with the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada.
The project took about three months, with two of us working on it full time, plus lots of help from others in the lab.
We started by making castings from research molds of the croc, which were slightly crushed. From there, we cut up bones, resculpted, filled in missing parts, etc. Once we’d reconstructed the skeletal parts, we molded them and made new castings. My boss did the bulk of the work reconstructing the skull; I did a lot of the detailing and positioned the teeth.
We built two crocodiles in poses selected by RSM. One of the crocs is supposed to look like it’s swimming (that’s the one I helped build), the other is standing. After they were all together, we painted them. I did most of the painting; the deadline was close so I had to finish them both in about 12 hours. We also detailed and painted a third set of castings but didn’t assemble those. Each croc is about 19 feet long.
My family and I stopped by the day after I finished work on the project to snap some quick photos. Thought I’d share them here.
The proper way to start this profile is to apologize. I first contacted fellow Coloradan Adam Dougherty in June 2010 to ask if he’d answer a few questions for my blog. We worked through some confusion and Adam had lots of information to me by November. Life has taken a lot of strange twists and turns since then, for both of us, in very different ways. Still, it shouldn’t have taken this long, and so for that I’m embarrassed and grateful to Adam for his patience.
It has been interesting watching Adam grow quickly from a surprisingly talented young sculptor selling his classic-monster busts on eBay into the talent behind some wonderful resin and plastic model kits. I’ve seen all of it through my computer, checking out the photos and reading his online auctions, his postings in a few forums, and his pages on Facebook and MySpace.
Adam, 20, credits his father for encouraging that growth. When his father died of cancer late last year, Adam shared the news online. He wrote:
“He was an amazing father, hell of a mechanic, and my biggest fan. He taught me how to build models in the first place, i owe it all to him.”
Adam says his father attended his first WonderFest with him, and watched proudly over the last few years while his son built his skills and reputation. He saw Adam start working with a number of small and large kit producers, notably Moebius Models.
Adam grew up in the Denver area and now lives in Westminster, Colo. A few years ago he became acquainted with Steve Riojas, writer for Amazing Figure Modeler magazine and professional model maker.
“I met Adam through my daughter, Rachel,” Steve wrote in an email. “They were good friends in school and when he came over to our house to visit he saw what I was working on in the garage and we started talking. After seeing his Creature from the Black Lagoon collection and especially his sculpting projects which showed how much talent he had in the rough, I started mentioning him to friends in the hobby. On his second trip to Wonderfest, I introduced him to kit producers, sculptors, hobby guys, and they immediately took a liking to him. Adam is a great kid, a talented sculptor, and I wish him all the best of luck.”
Today, Adam credits Steve on his MySpace page as a mentor. “Without his help I would still be doing little kits in my spare time. He has been a great help with my career and has taught… Read the rest
