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
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