First of all, deepest thanks to Roman Dirge for allowing me to post these. Be sure to visit his site at
[link] Lots of Dark Muffin fun!!
Lenore was a departure from most of the sculptures I've done. The character is much more basic in structure, and this can actually make it harder to sculpt in some ways. Simpler forms often have to be more exact than a well musculatured character. I spent a great deal of time on her face, using a baby skull structure initially. Her hair was done in two sections. This was done by hollowing out two areas at the top of her head, and putting two small aluminum plates ground down to fit in those sections. I then drilled about a dozen tiny holes into the top of each plate and glued dozens of small armature wires into those holes. These I bent down around the head to form the hair armature, and built up the hair over it. Once done, each of the two sections of hair were removed and baked seperately, molds being made from those.
Lenore herself came together pretty easily except for the face, which as I said, took some finessing.
The coffin was originally made of Balsa wood to get a look of natural grain, and I had sculpted some rough dirt around it to give the effect that it had thrust itself out of the ground. However, I realized the coffin was TOO real for the piece, and not angular enough. So I decided to sculpt it from scratch, and yes I was influenced by the style of "The Nightmare Before Christmas". The wavy grass/vines seemed to set the whole thing off much better than dirt.
Ragamuffin was just pure fun to sculpt, although his was a very convoluted two piece mold to pull off.
The hardest part of the whole operation was her hair. The molds had to be created for injection, so over 30 exits pins for each section were made so that the polyurethyne [silwhite] would travel to the tips of the hair.