True Blood Egyptian 'Bird Lady' Statue

[RobertMuldoon]

In the first episode of season 2 of True Blood there is a statue on Maryann’s coffee table. This is actually a replica of an pre-dynastic ancient Egyptian ‘Bird Lady’ statue which lives in the Brooklyn museum. This is the museum’s page on the artefact, which has a great description, photos (including x-rays) and measurements.

Here is a couple of screenshots of the replica statue in the programme and a couple of full photos of it:


The Brooklyn museum didn’t know about the statue being used in the programme and managed to get in touch of the production designer to ask about it. There’s a good write up of that on their blog here. Essentially though that boils down to the production team liking the statue, then having an artist make a replica model using photos from the Internet which they moulded and had three copies cast in plaster and painted up for use in the programme.

Technically I’m making this because I like ancient Egyptian artefacts and I can’t find an accurate replica of this, but as it’s featured in True Blood too I though people here might like to see the building process.

Step one will be to print out the various photos from the Internet, at full size. I should then be able to use those to take all the detailed measurements and get the shapes correct.

Step two will be building an armature.

Step three will be the clay sculpting phase. I’ve not decided which clay yet, probably either SuperSculpey or WED clay.

Step four will be moulding it, I’m pretty sure that will need to be a two part mould to make de-moulding straightforward.

Step five will be casting, probably in plaster. I will need to do some test castings to see if the hands and arms will be strong enough on their own or is they will need casting with reinforcing rods/wire in them.

Step six will be painting it, and I will probably use traditional ancient Egyptian pigments (since I’m currently doing a research project on that anyway).

I’ll update this thread as I make progress, but as with all my projects that will most likely be in bursts before I get bored/distracted and go and work on something else for a while

 

[RobertMuldoon]

Step 1
I’ve scoured the Internet and found some good reference photos. The collection on the Brooklyn museum is good, although I wish they would include a scale in their photos.

According to the museum, the statue is 292mm high, 140mm wide (at the widest part of the curve of the arms) and 57mm deep (mostly because of her steatopygy). I cropped my photos so that the statue filled them, put those in Word and told it to set the height to the correct value and then printed them out on A3:

 

[RobertMuldoon]

Step 2
I’ve used my full size reference to build the armature. I started out with 3mm and 1.6mm wire to build the initial armature, that was then packed out with tinfoil to close to the final shape and finally given a layer of tape. An obvious thing now, but as a pointer on the tape; use cheap masking tape! I used nice 3M stuff, which is great for masking because it doesn’t get stuck to whatever you’re masking, but for this use that meant it didn’t really want to stick to the foil and I have to wrap it a lot to make it just stick to itself. The cheap masking tape that ruins painting projects would be much better for this, so apparently it’s not completely useless

Here are a few photos I took as I went along, using the front and side views as my reference:


Next I need to buy more clay to get this clayed up for step 3…

 

[RobertMuldoon]

Step 3
After a long hiatus on this one, I’ve made a good amount of progress over the Christmas holidays.

I fleshed out the armature with Super Sculpey, I used full-size reference photos and Vernier callipers to get my model as close to the original as possible, and then I then smoothed that out (although not perfectly so):


The piece then went into the oven to bake, as a note on that the baking temperature of Sculpey is much lower than the auto-ignition temperature of wood so don’t worry about using a wooden base:


The original artefact the True Blood version was modelled on is made from Nile silt clay (giving it a reddish colour) which has a fair number of inclusions and the surface of it is fairly rough when you look at it. To replicate this I applied some Polyfilla (which, for the non-Brits reading this, is a wall filler) to my model once it’d been baked. I watered the Polyfilla down to form a sort of slip and kept varying the consistency to create bigger and smaller grains in it, I applied this to the model with a stick as randomly as I could. I also used non-watered down Polyfilla to fill the hole where the model was secured to its base. This is what it looked like after that:


The last step I’ve done has been to give it a coat of red oxide car primer spray paint, partly to make it look like the original but also so that I could have a clearer view on the texturing. Here’s a WIP shot of the spraying:


As a note to anyone wanting to use this process; the Polyfilla will soak up the paint and get wet again which can make it lift if you touch the piece whilst the paint is wet or tacky. So my advice is to keep each coat of paint as light as possible and not to touch it until you’re very sure it’s dry. Or do what I did and keep getting impatient and then have to re-spray sections :lol

And lastly a couple of glamour shots:


I’m going to give it a few days for everything to properly dry and cure, and then spray it in clear-coat before I make a silicone mould it and start to pull casts.