Happy Year Of The Prawn – err I Mean Dragon! And Happy Birthday Prawnling Project!

Yes, this blog is now over a year old! A year ago I had a general idea for a puppet, a rough sketch, and a frame of copper pipes wrapped in some aluminum foil – now, a year (and a dozen days) later I have a gray plasticine sculpture that is at least recognizable as a Prawn.

Hope everyone enjoyed their holiday of choice. We had a nice Christmas here.

And, because it’s the New Year and it’s what people do at this time of year I’ve decided to set myself some resolutions…

The first one I’ve kept to quite well – mainly that I’ve worked on CJ daily (with the exception of the weekends) since the beginning of January. I’m loving the workshop space my aunt and uncle have granted me – my uncle even built me an additional set of shelves over the holidays so that I could house my various tools and supplies more easily.

Resolution #2 - I think I’d like to try and have all the sculpting done by a month from now (so by Feb 19th). We’ll see how that goes. I’m giving a number of costuming panels at Ad-Astra in Toronto in early April and I would LOVE to have CJ done for then (especially since one of the panels is on building puppets…) but as I’ve mentioned before for once in my life I’m not going to rush myself for what are effectively arbitrary deadlines. This is not a commission, it’s a labour of love so I’m going to take my time. In a way it IS a commission-for me. And as both patron and artist I’m going to hold myself to a fairly enacting standard.

Which brings me to my third and final resolution and the one I’m trying hardest to uphold- to not be so hard on myself! Being both a perfectionist and fairly impatient person I find it rather easy to start beating myself over things I haven’t finished yet so I’m making a concentrated effort to look at what I have accomplished instead of chiding myself for not fulfilling goals that may actually be unrealistic or unreasonable. For example I haven’t worked on CJ 7-8 hours a day , five days a week, since the start of the year as I intended. I HAVE however put in a solid 3-5 hours every day, so really, why should I berate myself for the missing time?

… It’s funny how things work out. I was finishing the rough draft for this entry yesterday during a follow-up appointment for my broken wrist (which is doing well by the way!). Anyways, on the way home in the car I happen to hear a reading of “The Chair Men” by Robert Fulghum (the “Everything I Learned In Life I Learned In Kingergarten” dude). In the essay Fulghum relates coming across two young men who, for extra credit in college, were eating a chair. Yes, you read that right – eating a chair (I found a copy online here, so if you have 5 minutes check it out. It’s short and cute.) But if you don’t have 5 minutes here’s the kicker:

For all the goofiness of the project, these young men are learning patience and perseverance. Some things cannot be had except on a little-at-a-time, keep-the-long-goal-in-mind, stay-focused basis.

I’d say you’re a lot less goofy than eating a chair CJ, but I’m going to stick with you all the same ;)

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…

First A Dinosaur And Now - Professor X?!?

Yikes - well these pics are at least a week old (if not, perhaps, a little... more) but that's actually because I've been too busy sculpting to post :) (although not all of that sculpting was on CJ....)

So when we last left our intrepid Prawnling I'd roughed in the basic sculpt and it was onto the fun of refining things! :)

For which I decided the best place to start was at the top!

Sadly this meant popping off those cute temporary skewer stick antennae and undoing a lot of the nice details I was happy with when I first sculpted CJ's head before Christmas....

Rake - smooth, rake - smooth and thus...

Is it just me, or is CJ starting to look a little like Professor Xavier?

Kojak?

Egghead?

His profile was looking pretty good so I decided to compare it to my reference pic again in Photoshop. But in playing with the opacity filters over the two pictures I realized that it was sometimes hard to tell what was the edge of the reference photo and what was the edge of the sculpt.

So I took a fresh layer, lowered the opacity, and traced over the reference photo with a nice, bright colour like so. Then I repeated the process with my latest photo of the sculpt.

Then I set the opacity on both to 50% and overlapped them
(I had to change the green to blue because otherwise the red and green cancelled each other out where they overlapped. This is me failing Colour Theory 101)

So now the trick is to adjust the sculpt till the red lines match up with the blue ones (at least the head and torso lines - the "scaffolding" that's holding CJ up actually prevents me from sliding the legs into the exact same position as the ref pic).

I have had a few second thoughts about using this Photoshop overlay method quite so much. On the one hand it's quite helpful in showing me errors. On the other hand I wonder if it's really helping train my eye to analyze the shapes and forms correctly or am I just using it as a crutch?

Yet it's a common sculpting trick to hold a mirror up to your work in order to recognize irregularities in the sculpture that your mind has otherwise become desensitized to. Is this not just a high-tech mirror? I wonder...

Well it IS Valentine's Day...

... and I couldn't quite let the day go by without expressing some love and gratitude to the many people who are helping and supporting me, both with CJ in particular, and my goal of becoming an SFX artist in general.

(Those with low tolerance for 'mush' may wish to leave now ... ;) )

I want to thank everyone from my parents who don't mind the fact they have 3 ft of Prawnling sitting in the middle of their basement to the many friends and colleagues who've offered their advice and expertise on any number of items I've needed to pick their brains about.

In addition I have a WONDERFUL set of "cheerleaders" who are always ready with just the right words of encouragement, right at the moment I'm starting to doubt myself. I couldn't do this without you guys!

And for this particular project I do have to thank one particular person. She goes by many names but I like to call her "my best friend" ;)

From the beginning, when I was waffling over getting going, I would get emails saying "Are you working on CJ yet?" She offers a constant sounding board for all sorts of ideas (crazy or otherwise - like the one about starting this blog!) and has listened to me rant and rave and cheer. I couldn't ask for a better "Bestest Prawn Pal" ;)

And speaking of this blog... I have to say I've surprised myself. I debated with myself for weeks over whether I was going to bother with it or not (I figured CJ would be enough work on his own) but now that we're a few weeks in I'm finding I'm really enjoying the process of doing the blog in and of itself. I find I come out of my workshop all excited about writing down my thoughts on CJ for the day.

CJ (and the blog) are both rapidly becoming a true labour of love.

The Tortoise, The Hare, And The Talking Dog

Having discovered I had made an inaccurate armature, I clearly had a decision to make – did I continue on with the sculpt as it was or did I strip off all the clay, fix the armature to be more screen-accurate, and effectively start over?

On the one hand the sculpt was starting to turn around. I was definitely happier with the way things were looking in general and with the head in particular. CJ was starting to look like, well, CJ.

And although I can be quite the perfectionist, I am not, shall we say, an Adam-Savage-&-The-Maltese-Falcon- level perfectionist.*** – that last ¾” wouldn’t necessarily make me twitch. So, in theory, I could keep going. I’d know there was something off, but if I did a good enough job with everything else, most folks seeing the puppet (minus a few super-obsessive fans and/or people who actually worked on the movie) would just go “Hey! Cool! The kid from District 9!” and not notice anything was wrong.

On the other hand – I could strip off all that clay and start over… but at the expense of missing a deadline for the 2nd time…

You see, and I’m kinda embarassed to admit this, I’d VERY naively thought, when I started this project in the Fall, that if I REALLY pushed myself I could get CJ done in time to bring him with me when I went to the International Make-Up Artists’ Tradeshow in London England at the end of my three weeks in Europe. Never mind my day job, all the normal rushing around for Christmas, my preparations for the trip itself, or oh yeah, the fact that as Maid of Honour at my sister’s upcoming wedding I had offered to both a) organize her bridal shower, and b) make her wedding dress. If I REALLY pushed I could get CJ done and oh my, wouldn’t it be fun to have him at the show with me. A real conversation starter for sure…

Well as the sheer enormity of the task I had set for myself by taking on this project set it, it was obvious I was not going to taking a fully functional Prawn puppet in my carry-on to London (my first clue? The 1st armature, something I thought I’d be able to throw together in an afternoon had taken me nearly a week and a half to assemble). But, I thought, maybe if I got the sculpt done then at least I could take some really nice in-progress pics in my portfolio… surely that would be a reasonable deadline to push for wouldn’t it?

Bit of a case of The Tortoise and The Hare really. Did I sprint head long for the finish line or did I go slow and steady but with a chance of winning the race? Well I’ve been the Hare before – MANY times, usually in a desperate attempt to finish a costume in time for a con. And I’ve gotten to the finish line alright – collapsed over it in fact and the only way I managed to stay up and running at all was by sheer momentum, willpower, and a little luck.

And that’s fine for cosplaying. There is a certain element of “talking dog syndrome” to cosplaying at a convention. Sure, fine artistry and craftsmanship are appreciated, but if you pick something really out there and ambitious for your costume you’ll get a certain amount of accolades just because you managed to pull the costume off period (no one cares what the talking dog says - everyone is just impressed with the fact it can talk at all). After all – you’re not a professional, so everyone understands that you have to make due with the materials and time limitations you have on hand.

The problem is that I want to BE a professional. I stated in the intro to this blog that it’s my dream to be a special effects artist one day and “make monsters” for a living. Even though I make costumes and puppets for the sheet love of it, I’m also supposed to be learning my craft so that it can one day be my career. And a “talking dog” attitude just doesn’t cut it for a professional.

The other problem with being the Hare is that you’re not always proud of yourself afterwards. Yes, it’s common for artists’ to be overcritical of themselves and their work but there is always a line where you COULD actually have done a better job if you’d just slowed down, and been more careful. The last time I showed my portfolio to someone I was ashamed to discover I was making excuses for almost every piece. I didn’t want that to happen with CJ…

So I made myself a deal. I would NOT give myself a deadline – I’d give myself a schedule. As long as I worked on CJ at least an hour a day (more if possible) then I’d let him take as long as he takes. 6 months, 9 months, a year – it was all good. The goal is NOT to get CJ done as quickly as possible but to do him to the best of my abilities, and hopefully learn a lot while I do it.

It’s true, if I’d done the whole sculpt and then figured out what was wrong, I might have been MORE tempted to just keep going and hope no one noticed. But I was really not so far along that starting again would set me back all that much. After all a) everything should go faster the second time and b) I’d feel better knowing things were closer to what I really wanted.

After all, he might not be the “real” CJ but he was going to be MY CJ – and I want to be proud of him when he’s all done.

Now I fully admit this might be a big load of Prawn-poop. Heck, I’M half convinced it’s a load of Prawn-poop. I know there is definitely a proper time and place for The Hare method – I’m just not convinced this is one of them. For once I want to try the way of the turtle…

*** If you’ve never watched Mythbuster Adam Savage’s presentation on Dodos, The Maltese Falcon, and The Art of Obsession I highly recommend it. At the very least you’ll get a very entertaining glimpse at what’s it’s like to research a prop/costume recreation project.