After years of working on masks, there came a make or break decision: get a workshop or get rid.
And so ended my time as a horror mask maker…
…and thus began my time in the garage kit scene.
What? You don’t know what a garage kit is? Garage kits are home made models, usually made from resin or white metal or a mixture of both. The kit is sculpted out of Fimo or Super Sculpey which are heat-hardening polymer clays. The sculpture is produced, cut into sections (usually arms, head, torso, legs) and cast in two-part silicone moulds. Resin or thermal setting polyurethane is then poured into the moulds to make castings of the parts. The parts were often quite rough and needed the seams cleaning up and bubbles filling before the kit could be built and painted.
After a while, enthusiasts began moving away from handcasting in favour of companies that could take the sculpture, create moulds and produce a set number of castings for a price.
The business was (and still is) rife with unscrupulous dealers who take a model and ‘recast’ it to sell themselves.
Some exceptional work came out of that time, and fantastic pieces based on movie characters are still being produced.
After a while away, I came back to sculpting, finishing a sculpture of Simba, from the Lion King, reworking my old Predator sculpture, and embarking on new sculptures of Terminator characters. You’ll find them all in the following galleries.