If You’ve Had A Dose of a Freaky Ghost

Who you gonna call? Not Michelle or I, that’s for sure. We don’t want anything to do with ghosts. Unless, of course, the ghosts are part of some cute and creepy art project like this week’s Ghostbusters Mini-Puft Sculpt-Off!

To hype ourselves up for the opening of Ghostbusters:Frozen Empire, we challenged each other to sculpt one of the tiny marshmallow mini-pufts from the movie. Michelle chose to work with felted wool, and I decided to sculpt my spook out of clay.

There are pros and cons to each medium. Michelle benefited from being able to alter, change, and repair her sculpt right up to and through our video/photo shoot. I couldn’t do that with my solid rock of clay.

On the other hand, my clay sculpt didn’t confuse the camera the way the fuzzy wool edges of Michelle’s sculpt did, and I was able to finish my sculpt well before she could. The needle felting process consumes time the way Slimer consumes hot dogs.

The bases we decided on are just simple black plinths with the classic Ghostbusters “NO” logo on top. That way they retain that black/white/red color theme of the original logo, and the mini-puft ghosts look like they’re popping out of the logo to come to life.

One final element we added to match the violent streak these malevolent marshmallows posses is weaponry. In the movie, these creatures are always putting each other through devastating physical distress: burning each other with fire, running each other through with skewers, liquifying each other in blenders. But our creatures aren’t marshmallows, they’re clay and wool. So their weapons reflect their art supply origins.

If you wanna see Michelle and I try to defeat each other in this Ghostbusters Sculpt-Off, the video is linked below.

This Is Walter! A ‘Burbs Diorama

This week we threw the 1989 cult classic, The ‘Burbs, into the disc player and watched it four dozen times. Pretty similar to any other week around here. But this time we were also using it as reference for our latest diorama project.

We recreated the “THIS IS WALTER” scene, and if you’ve seen the movie you know why we chose it. If you haven’t seen the movie….wha?!

A lot of this project was an exercise in learning how to sculpt loose-fitting vacation togs over a figure. I used CosClay, of course, because some of those shirt tails and shorts would absolutely shatter into dust if I’d used regular polymer clay. But the CosClay allowed those wafer-thin parts of the sculpt to remain flexible and break-resistant.

This project was also an exercise in trying not to injure myself. I decided to try out a router attachment/cutting guide on my Dremel to dig out a channel for the Klopek’s fence. It was a relatively minor routing job but the rotary tool had to be cranked up to near top speed while I was pushing the router bit through the wood. My whole arm was rumbling from fingertips to shoulder and I thought the tool was going to fly from my hand the whole time. Luckily, I held on.

But that was nothing compared this buzzsaw-style cut-off wheel I used to slice off a plastic owl’s head (part of the Klopek’s pest control system). I think the key is to always wear safety gear (I had on my goggles and respirator) and pay attention to what you’re doing. I know, even with all those precautions, you could still lose a finger. So I’m glad I made it through unscathed.

The rest of the project was pretty low-pressure, thankfully. I didn’t even have to nail any precise likenesses since I was doing cartoony versions of Art and Ray, not portrait sculptures of Rick Ducommun and Tom Hanks. Maybe I could’ve attempted that. But when you’re busy with your eighty-ninth rewatch of The ‘Burbs, who’s got the time?

If you want to see how Michelle and I put this admittedly very niche diorama together, here’s a link to this week’s process video.