Yes, I know…

Quite busy between a flurry of work, sculpture fever and the latest boardgame craze, that blog has been neglected a bit, that’s an understatement…

Anyway, in the meantime, have a look at the nearly-always interesting Bruce Sterling blog and its latest post.

Some changes have been made on the Epitafe website, including, but not limited to, bug corrections (some links were incorrect), randomization of the categories on the main page (try it!), addition of breadcrumbs to improve usability and a couple other very small details.

Please note that the Bones Candles category has been become Body Parts Candles, a subtle hint of things to come…

Yes, that’s what I am… At last I found a way to have proper teeth in a sculpture. And as too often, it seems quite obvious in retrospect!

In short, copy nature and create them separately, then implant them in the jaws… duh!

Anyway, here is the Goatosaurus, a very rare fossil, found exclusively in my kitchen, and initialy thought by specialist to be a goat’s skull…

I’ve started sculpture lessons a while ago, in order to learn (new) techniques and especially discover new materials.

Last session, we dabbled in aluminium wire, aluminium paper and modroc (looks a lot like the gypsum bandages used in medicine) and lo!

Behold the Turkey of Doom, the ghost of all the turkeys killed by obese Americans to stuff themselves each Thanksgiving! It’s coming back from infernal Limbo to make them suffer! In the meantime, it could probably use a bit of paint…

I don’t know yet if i’ll be able to make anything usable as a candle, but we’ll see.

Well, that’s pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it?

Will be back soon.

When you try to make candles out of bones, the vertebral column becomes quite an obvious choice: just pile a couple vertebraes on top of each other, and here it is! You get a nice tall candle and, contrary to using other long bones in the human body, wide enough to burn for some time and stand by itself.

Well, long story short, I wanted to make one… There was an issue, though: when I was thinking about it, I was, like most people I guess, thinking about a pile of what is called the centrum or the vertebral body. But there is more! I was completely forgetting the vertebral arch, which constitute the posterior part of a vertebrae. Hum, an image is probably needed. Wikipedia power:

Those funny looking bits are quite thin and elongated, which is nearly anathema to any kind of candle, especially with the kind of molds I use…

What was the solution, then? Well, brute force, of course! Just break’em to make them fit and that’s it…

In any case, I never pretended that it was a accurate copy, and I quite like the result. And it is quite obvious what it is, despite all the inaccuracies and “artistic licence”…

Just a extra-quick post with a nice citation, while I try to disentangle myself of a stupidly busy week  (I’m just not used to that anymore, that’s all…)

Orson Welles, in The Third man:

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had 500 years of democracy and peace and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

…

Here it is:

Work on that candle was initiated by my research into what ended up being the current, new, Epitafe logo, i.e., the half-skull. Looking at it upside down, I wondered if that shape could work out as a candle, with the wick protruding from the chin.

But early attempts quickly proved how wrong I was… I ended up with a very unbalanced candle, not mentioning that the wick had to be twisted down backwards in order to have enough wax to burn. The problem was not so much with the idea, but with the human anatomy :-)!

The solution came later: with a wider, bigger lower jaw, and with placing a “regular” candle behind it (do not tell anybody, but that piece comes from plastic legs from a piece of furniture long gone). Those two measures had the effect of both providing enough wax to the wick and also of creating a very nice lighting effect in mid-burning, as in the photo below:

As a sidenote, that skull indeed has a very, very large lower mandible and the very pronounced brow ridges would make a pretty strange human face if it was covered in muscles and flesh. The cleft in the chin was unintentional, but gives a bit more character to the skull, so it stayed :-).

Everybody has seen twice-colored candles. The process to create them is quite simple: you make a candle and “double-dip” it, i.e., you add a layer of wax in a different color.

The Epitafe candles (as, I guess, every proper skull candle) tend to “cry” when they are burned, which means that, after a certain amount of burning, liquid wax flows through the eye sockets. Starting from there, it wasn’t too much of a trouble to have a differently colored core inside the skull, so that the wax “tears” would be colored differently.

But I thought that wasn’t enough. In most cases (sic), there is a brain inside a skull :-). So there needed to have a proper brain inside!

That’s why I started by carving a full skull candle, in order to create some kind of “slot” inside. Then, I sculpted and molded a proper small-sized brain.

In practice, the creation of that candle involves casting both parts separately, using a very long wick for the skull part, and a leaving a hollow core in the brain. Then, they are assembled by threading the brain on the skull and sealing both with waw, to end up with that:

I am quite happy with the result :-), especially once the brain starts to oozes through the eye sockets, like this:

All available, in the color of your choice, on Epitafe!

Finally done, and none too late!

I’m quite pleased to welcome you to the brand new Epitafe webshop! As you can see, the look and feel is now consistent with the blog’s.

To conclude such a frenzy of redesign and creation of new candles, I will showcase some of them here in the coming days and resurrect that blog as well :-).