New acquisitions

Greetings all! by the looks of these pictures, one might think that I recently returned from some sort of archaeological dig, where I unearthed a mini collection of ancient "belly-talking" artifacts.
In actuality, I recently acquired these from ventriloquist, Charlie Horner. Not too far back, Charlie secured what once was the Finis shop. It seems that he has been gradually making some of the shop's odds & ends available.
In this set, I acquired a rather rough looking Finis face, which looks to be made of an old wood dough formulation. The face itself, looks like it might make a nice ventriloquist figure head with a bit of work.
The head stick is solid wood and will lend itself for the sculpting of future clay heads and the mouth appears to be solid wood, as are the nicely carved hands.
With regard to the hands, I will also use these at some point.
All in all, this is really old stuff, but still useful. What's old might just prove to be new again!

until next time...

Happy New Year...

... and greetings to everyone! In keeping up with one of my new year's resolutions, which was to provide a long over-due blog entry, here I am with some recent pictures of Elroy. Unfortunately, I am afraid that most of the latter portion of last year kept me extremely busy with many non-ventriloquist figure building pursuits. So, I am starting up the new year with some new progress with regard to Elroy and I also have plans for the building of a newer figure from some castings which I purchased from Joe Smith. Also, I have just put in a new order for some more Klean Klay in order to start sculpting a new head for a brand new offering which I hope to have available for sale by the end of the summer of this year.
As for Elroy, this past month I have constructed the free floating eye mechanism, installed the eyes, repainted the head in more of an orange flesh color, and tinted the areas above the eyes for a retro 1950's Frank Marshall look. The reason for this was due to my feeling that my original paint job was just too pale and seemed to me that he would be washed out on stage by any over head lighting. So, I have decided to break away from my lighter toned skin color and mixed a large batch of my own orange blend of flesh color which I will use from now on.
With regard to the eyes, they are wood with gloss white laquer and hand painted acrylic irises. It took a very steady hand to paint these, but in taking my time, I was able to come up with a nicely painted set. I also applied a few coats of acrylic clear gloss to the irises for some extra added detail.
And those ears--he's got them. I chose to make more of a cartoonish rendering of ears rather than carving something more realistic.
So, the only thing left to do is to run the eye control rod, construct the body, which I plan to make out of wood, with wire ribbing, and wig him. Once Elroy is completed, I may put him up for sale on Mike Brose's site first and possibly E-Bay next. But, I would love for someone from the vent community to snatch him up first, which is why I will post him up for sale on Puppet & Props first at a special price.

So, for the time being, Stay tuned & keep building !