All Grown Up

Hey All,

This is the first in a series of mini-dioramas that will eventually fit into a huge post-apocalyptic scene that will be a tribute to my favorite sculptors. This piece, that I call All Grown Up, combines two of my favorite sculpts from Yasushi Nirasawa: Nina Darkness and Logust on Quasimodo Bike. Being a fan of the fairer sex, I chose to replace Logust as the rider of the Quasimodo bike with Nina Darkness; my inspiration for this was based on the young girl riding behind Logust in the original piece of art Nirasawa created before the Fewture kit was produced. I always imagined that the girl riding behind the dark rider was a young Nina and now all grown up, she has taken to the roads on her own wild ride.

To accomplish this, I needed to substantially reposition Nina's legs from her very upright position to something that would allow her to straddle the motorcycle and give her the appearance of rising to combat as she quickly stops the bike. I also replaced the lower half of her rather huge "mutated" arm with the lower arm from Erick Sosa's Space Host so that she could both be wielding a cool gun, and more practically have a hand that would allow her to grasp the handlebars on the bike when she wasn't spraying hot lead. This required a fair amount of work with a saw and a bunch of the most complex sculpting I've done to date. This was also the first time I'd ever used "hair" for a kit ... the Nina kit comes bald w/ a swathe of hair you have to attach. I tried to give her a punk haircut (shaved on one side complete w/ some subtle painting to look like stubble). Shaping the hair was tricky, I found it helpful to use hand lotion on the hair (it will eventually evaporate), but while it was wet, it allowed me to comb her hair into a position I liked.

The other piece of substantial work on this piece was the base. It was inspired from many hours of playing Fallout. I tried to create a broken piece of highway complete with rebar. To make the road, I created a form with legos, cut a bunch of steel rod as my rebar and placed it inside the form and then poured the road using Vatican Art Stone (a very cool plaster that has a particulate in it that makes it very crystalline so that when it breaks, it looks like real rock). Once the plaster cured, I pulled out a hammer and started whacking away at the places where I wanted to road to have collapsed. I was quite happy with how this worked out, but in the end, a 12" x 18" sheet of plaster weighs a fair amount and does limit what shelves I could actually display this on.

I hope you enjoy the piece. As I mentioned earlier, there will be future additions that will eventually create a finished piece on the order of 4' x 6'. If you'd like to see more pics, please visit my website at: [link] or you can check out this collage [link] on deviantArt.

Oh, and no the tires aren't rubber (they are resin just like everything else), but I am pleased w/ how they turned out

jim