ANDY FISH

ANDY FISH is a comic book artist

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Halloween at WAM!

I teach a year long class for Teens on Thursday nights as part of WAMs Teen Thursday program.  Teen Thursdays are intensive portfolio geared classes with included pizza break and a visit from various art colleges.  My class is the only one (right now) that's runs the year, which allows me the opportunity to get further in depth study that would otherwise not be doable in a regular 10 week class.

Halloween fell on a Thursday this year and I know that's an important holiday to a lot of folks, myself included, and I didn't want to just have class as usual so I proposed the idea of creating a giant puppet which we could walk around the Lancaster and WPI neighborhood on Halloween night.

The students jumped at the idea and worked hard to assemble a creature made of cardboard, duct tape, paint and other found materials we had lying around the museum.


Step One was to construct a base which we mounted temporarily to an easel to make it easier to work on.  From there we attached some cut cardboard to mimic the form of the face as well as cheek bones and a naval cavity.



From there we went on to begin covering the form with structural cardboard to create the planes of the cheeks and jowls, then we began to cover that with white duct tape.


We attached a bottom jaw which we wanted to be able to move independently from the head.  We have lights for the eyes and the top of the head which will give us the impression of a light up brain.



Still more duct tape which we wrapped in the direction of the muscles which make up the human face and finished off the teeth and added a tongue.

From here it was a matter of creating a body and hands...