Friday, November 5, 2010

The second costume

This fall I decided I was going to give costuming a second go and so I started searching for a second character to recreate.

This time around I chose to go as Ash from the Wes Anderson film Fantastic Mr. Fox. (I'm sure you've seen it. RIGHT?) Ash has quite alot less going on so he was a little simpler to bring to life even though I ran into plenty of problems.

The first thing that I wanted to build was his whackbat. So I grabbed a fairly hefty oak plank and an oak dowel.


Using some wood glue and a good set of clamps I cut and laminated the wood together to create the basic shape. Next I used a hand plane to shape the sharp corners of the bat down to rounded edges (One day I hope to have the power tools to perform all these operations). Using a hole bore bit I dug out a spot for the handle and glued it in. For a bit of flair I bought a replacement table leg piece to put onto the end of the handle.

After a bit of sanding we hit it with some minwax wood stain.


The color looked good but there were a few places where glue had dripped onto the wood. I sanded these spots out and restained it. Once I had the color right I used some Sculpey to make the nobs that whacbats sport. I tapped a small hole for each one and using a small peg, to make sure they didn't fall off, I attached them along the outer edges of the whackbat. Then it was time for lacquer.


Not to shabby if I say so myself. 

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