ZA News: 2009 -2010

I was extremely fortunate to work on some sculptures for the Political satire puppet series:
Puppet Nation

Here are some of my projects from the show.

All puppets start with a design based of the cartoons of Jonathan Zapiro. Back then we simply used a grid pattern to identify slight variations of the drawings.
I would do a quarter scale maquette sculpt and the final full size head sculpt.

Sep Blatter:

 Winnie Mandela:

 Trevor Noah:

Robert Mugabe:

 Manatashe:

Vavi :

 Barak Obama:

 This must be my last maquette, I do not recall sculpting the full puppet. He turned out great!

  Will try to find the sculptor responsible and add credit here

The show is still going with a growing cast of seriously funny caricatures by talented new sculptors:

Steve Bannon:

 Will try to find the sculptor responsible and add credit here

Trump :

  Will try to find the sculptor responsible and add credit here

Ninja and Jolandi from Die Antwoord:

 Will try to find the sculptor responsible and add credit here

Watermill 2016

Another family project while visiting back in South Africa.
We decided to have a go at a fantasy themed watermill.

Quick pencil sketch design

Basic structure done with cardboard and balsa wood.

We sculpted the stonework in with some paper clay.

All the roof tiles are cut out of cardboard from cereal boxes.

Acrylic paints

Some grass and bushes sourced from a railroad model shop.

Punch Up art project: 2009

Really just a time filler, I did this little sculpt to capture a kitschy comic book inspired action moment.

Sculpted in medium Chavant NSP

Molded, cast in urethane and painted in acrylic

Thunderbirds Are Go! Season 1: Thunderbird Hangars, 2015

Deep within the natural lava chambers of Tracy Island lie hidden a network of hangars housing the Thunderbird vehicles.

Thunderbird 1 Hangar

 Sofia Bue was a key model maker on all of these interiors due to her excellent model making and paint skills. Her ability to crawl into cramped parts of the sets came in useful too.

The original show is known for having used everyday household objects as detailing in their sets and vehicles. This technique was called scratch building. We made the stylistic choice to do the same with our sets.

In the original you could clearly see a lemon squeezer mounted to the wall just behind TB1

We did the same, but where our set is bigger we actually had to fabricate a larger replica of a squeezer.

Refuel hangar

Thunderbird 2 Hangar and launch pad

David Duke is gluing extra Gack onto a model. We had a huge collection of random small objects we added as details. Names for these included: Nurnies, Greeblies, Goeties and Foefenjollies to name just a few.