Good thing you're not a girl CJ...

... or I might get in trouble for the cropping on these pictures ;)

Here's roughing in of CJ's chest...

I can see this area going through multiple changes because this is one spot my reference material is a little sketchy.

I have some GREAT shots of the Weta maquette, which should, in theory, be OK after reading in The Art of District 9 that the major differences between the CJ maquette and the finished CG CJ were all in the face... however some of the screen shots seem to contradict this. And then of course the problem with the screen shots is that they're often blurry and CJ's t-shirt obscures any details.

So I have no choice but to more or less follow the Weta maquette... but we'll see how happy with it I am, the further I get.

Head Games...

(Something tells me by the time I'm done this Prawn puppet I'm going to have exhausted all the creative titles involving the word 'head' :P )

So here's CJ, happily positioned back out in the middle of my newly cleaned workshop, ready to be sculpted!

You may recall I was trying to keep the sculpt at the same level of "doneness" as I worked (ie. I didn't want to completely finish off one area, like the head, while other parts were still in just-roughed-in stage).

Having roughed in CJ's basic shape I wanted to do a little more refining, so I started back at CJ's head, with the plan to work my way down.

Here you can see me roughly "sketching" in some guidelines (while standing on a stool, I should note) as I try and get both sides of the head to be the same shape.

I also started, after comparing the sculpt to the super-cute reference pic, to cautiously fill in around the eyes and bulk-up CJ's "cheek-bones" (cheek exo-skeleton?), and roughly sketch in his face-plates.

More refining and rounding off of the back of CJ's head. I used a rake tool to start and then smoothed that with a loop tool (yes, with temporary skewer-antennae).

Roughing in CJ's head ridges - you can see how I did one side and then used a mirror to see if I was getting the second ridge the right size and shape.

With both ridges roughed in.

Pleased with the progress I decided to then move onto CJ's chest next.

I'm back fro- 2 MONTHS!?!

Great Prancing Prawns has it really been 2 months?!!

I signed off my last post saying that it would be a few days before I got back to working on CJ because I had to finish my sister’s wedding dress and prep the make-up for an independent film I was helping with.

All of which DID happen – it just took a gosh darn bit longer than I was expecting it too.

I literally ended up in the trenches…

… on the set of 21 Brothers, an independent film about a battalion from Kingston ON, Canada in WWI. I got to do fun things like get everyone really dirty (with fake dirt), play with an air-powered bullet rig, and give someone a nice case of trench foot…

… Mmmmm juicy… ;)

Then my friends in Toronto threw me an Octopus’ Garden Party in honour of my 30^th birthday where someone ended up bringing cans of cat food as decoration…

… then someone else gave me a D9 “Non-Human” dog-tag as a present, and one of the party games was “Pin-The-Pom-Pom-On-The-Prawn”.

(No, I’m not kidding, and yes, my friends are AWESOME)

I swear, if you know me well enough, this Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Octopus-Holding-An-Interstellar-Ant-Queen cake makes perfect sense…… really

And yes, I finished my sister’s wedding dress (two days before the wedding, rather than a month early like I’d hoped). The skies cleared, the heavens smiled, the Bride and Groom both looked stunning, and much, much fun was had by the crowds of family and friends who joined us to celebrate the day…

But, to paraphrase Kermit the Frog … “those were disasters we knew about all along”. I knew about the film, the party, and the wedding all ahead of time (my time management/estimating skills just suck is all). I managed to squeeze in ONE short session of sculpting in all of April, and the results were negligible...

Poor CJ all alone and armless, relegated to the corner of the workshop…

The TRUE unforeseen disaster which sidelined my entire family for the last several weeks started with my father coming down with what we thought was food poisoning or a 24hr flu bug and ended up with him in the local ICU on kidney dialysis and a respirator. I’m very, VERY, happy to report that he has just come home and that at this point it looks like he will make a full and complete recovery.

But things were scary for awhile…

… and somewhat paradoxically that’s exactly the time I went running back to CJ.

When my Dad was out of danger and stable but still under sedation in the hospital I reached the point where I had to work on SOMETHING. I felt like I’d been holding my breath for two weeks and I desperately needed to do something that did NOT involve the hospital or mindlessly sitting in front of the TV. In fact my mother insisted I get up and get moving and work on something to relieve the stress and worry that was plaguing me.

And CJ was the perfect solution.

I’ve already had a few great 3-4 hour sessions with him in the last few days and am making real visible progress. So in the next few posts I will endeavor to keep further yakking on my part to a minimum while I show you what the two of us have been up to…