I LEARNED FROM COMIC BOOKS...
...and TeeVee, and Dungeons and Dragons,
and the Internet. Even though they don't really exist, demons do contribute
something to the cultural landscape and the mighty economic engine. That's
real enough, and because they create jobs, they can't be all bad.
This is a return to an unfinished project I
started about 5 years ago. Back then, it was finished enough for the website,
so I guess I lost interest and moved on to other things. That was back
when I was working like a dog to fulfill my website obligation, still
had lots of things that I wanted to make, and still had somewhere to put
them. Ahhh... the good ol' days. That story played out to its inevitable
conclusion: I haven't started any new projects in quite a while. That's
great for freeing up time to do other things, except it's a fun hobby
and I like to make stuff. The solution for someone in my situation is
to rework old stuff: The wonderful thing is that it doesn't take up any
additional space. What a concept!
The path to this realization was a little convoluted. I was stringing
cable, too lazy to move stuff, and snagged my kewl Lady Death statue.
Crash. Wish I could have blamed that one on the cats, but I had no reason
to deceive myself. Idiot. After repairing it, I wondered, "What ever happened
to Lady Death, the comic (not the comedienne)?" I knew that it was a dramatic
sugar-to-shit story, with Chaos Comics riding high on the "Bad Girls"
comics wave in the 90s, then falling hard into Chapter 7 when the wave
crashed. The Internet was invented for stuff like this. Hot damn! She's
still around and Brian Pulido has managed to rise from the ashes. (For
what it's worth, it's not the same Lady Death-- for me, she died when
Steven Hughes did (R.I.P.), and none of the other artists ever came close.)
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This got me examining what I'd already made, and pointed to the obvious
path. It really didn't matter to me if it was The Officially Licensed
Lady Demon; I just wanted a red-skinned demoness with big hair. Acme,
the Generic Red Demoness was the closest I had to a red-skinned California
beach gal style demoness (Brucelia being on the heiferish side of the
scale). I strongly suspect that Lady Demon was an original inspiration
for Acme anyway... I changed some things to make her "generic", so it
didn't look like I was borrowing the whole concept from Chaos. This resulted
in a bald-headed fusion of Chaos' Lady Demon & Purgatory characters.
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Anyways, during this trip down memory
lane (and looking at Clayburn Moore's stuff-- fantastic sculptor, but another
digression), I reviewed a picture of "Lady Demon", who was pretty hot-looking
for a snarly, big-haired, red demoness. Hey, right up my alley: I wouldn't
mind having a 3-D representation of that. All this revisiting inspired
me to make my once-every-few-years pilgrimage to Austin Books & Comics,
which happened to have the old, out-of-production Lady Demon sculpture...
kewl! I want it. Problem was, they'd forgotten to put a sign on it, and
it turned out that someone had been paying on it. I wasn't too crushed,
since this was clearly the Great Watunga intervening in an impulse purchase
(dammit!)... besides, I wasn't too fond of the facial sculpt (hot bod, yeah...
but the face is everything.)
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The big hair might not be a direct borrowing from Chaos (since we all know that demonesses come in all sorts of hair and hairless fashions), but the crotch skull is pretty brazen. I wanted some more metal in that region, and I've gotten over some of my snootiness about the overdone skull cliché. After all, this is a low-brow "artform" (if it can be called that). Mainly, this was just a fun thing to give me an excuse to hammer metal. I don't think I've ever hammered out detailed shapings in thick copper sheet like this before, so it was interesting. It took a lot of time, hammering with a lot of different stakes on the small scrap of metal, but it gradually got there. I heated it to try to match the patina of the other pieces, but it clearly looks newer-- I don't know how to speed up the natural tarnishing process. In contrast, the tiny skull on her choker was quick and easy, since I used thin copper sheet foil. The only hammering done was to get the basic domed shape: The detail was pressed in with sculpting tools. Although her waist is unnaturally slim, I didn't want to mess with it, because there was a bigger smallness problem: Her boobs. I believe that originally, I was deliberately trying to do something different, and gave Acme my conception of reasonably-sized boobs. I didn't do a very good job on her cleavage though: It was sort of halfway there, sort of halfway not. I remedied this by increasing her cup size to borderline heroic proportions (by my standards). Naturally, this affected the way her bra fit, so I had to do something about that. Sounds easy, but it was more trouble than I expected. I ended up redesigning the way the bra, choker & shoulderpads were attached. I didn't like the original choker/necklace design anyway; I thought it made her look kinda clown-like. Since this was a simple reworking, I didn't expect to see huge changes. There were things that I liked about the original look so I left them alone, notibly her face sculpt. At one point I was tempted to change it simply because that would go a long way towards creating a completely new look. In the end, I decided to keep it because the expression is a strange mix of smirking snarlishness, and I'm a sucker for that. There's still room for changes, but that's the great thing about this hobby-- nothing's ever really "finished". --10/14/07
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Since I don't care anymore, I'm free to borrow whatever gives me a result
I like. Despite whatever impressions I may have given to the contrary,
I believe that women look better with hair... preferably, big hair. (Okay,
not as big as Lady Demon's comic book style hair, since I have to deal
with doll world physics.) Although I feel that black hair looks more natural
on red-skinned demonesses, I was intrigued by the idea of using a lighter
color... hey, just like Lady Demon? I first tried pure white yarn, which
looked really weird. White looks good on Lady Demon, probably because
she's a comic book character and her skin tone is a brighter, orangy red;
there may be too much contrast against Acme's darker burgundy. I didn't
have a lot of choices, but I found some gray mohair and tried to bleach
it lighter. The color turned out okay (a light gray), but the hair was
a totally unmanageable matted mess. Nothing I tried seemed to fix this.
The darker stuff was only slightly better. I settled for a mix of shades,
ripping out any usable strands I could find to glue down. As expected,
it's a horrible, frizzy mess that sheds if you even glance at it. It also
makes her look older (I wonder why?). I've been stubbornly insistent on
making this work, or at least giving it a try, until something better
comes along.
