Dwarf photo shoot.

I had worked on this shoot for some time and while I was pretty happy with how the pictures came out, the conditions were a little distracting - the heat and the insects - that I failed to notice a few
wardrobe malfunctions that didn't ruin the pictures, but annoyed me a little to see.

The idea behind the shoot was to do a Hobbit inspired Dwarf, not to replicate anything specific from the movies, but to create my own version.

Most people probably won't see what I'm talking about, so I won't mention what went wrong so it doesn't ruin the pictures for anyone.

I also made a pair of short swords I intended to feature in some of the shots a little more prominently, again because of the conditions, we rushed a little and didn't bother. We plan on revisiting this shoot in the fall when it's cooler and no insects to see what else we can get out of the shoot. I'll probably do the beard up a little better as well.

Overall, I'm happy with the shots, it worked as well as I'd planned and I look forward to doing a little more with this makeup and costume.

Now normally I only create Demon characters, but in the mythology behind my characters, Dwarves actually are of Demonic origins (as are all typical fantasy creatures), they are a cross breeding of an ancient breed of Earth Troll and Neanderthal Man. This created a short humanoid being, explains the englarged nose, ears, (and sometimes prominent brow) and excessive body hair across both genders.Also the stereotypical  aspects of living underground and mining, but very strong traits in Earth Trolls.

Buddha Cthulhu

Not really sure if I should call it a Cthulhu Buddha or a Buddha Cthulhu. Either way it's a little awesome.

I just have three for right now, I need to  redo the mould and then they'll be up for a limited online retail run of 50 at $35 each. 3 inches tall, cast in resin with a faux brass look and given a hard gloss coating to protect the finish. I might adjust the faux brass look with a base coat of brown rather than black. I tried a patina on it and wasn't really happy with it, it lightened it up too much.

 The three I have are currently for sale, I'll be posting them on Etsy, but you don't have to go through that site if you don't want to. Shipping is as low as $15 in Canada, 9 days or $18 for 3 days on average. $13 to the US, 6-10 days, other options are available though. And overseas $21, 6-10 days - on average.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/234557008/buddha-cthulhu?ref=shop_home_active_1

Moonshine of the Damned Update

So here's an update on where things are with the movie - why it's taking so long and all that crap.

As of today, all of the dialog has been recorded and synced up in editing. That's another hurdle finally overcome and the one that's been taking the longest. I've only two scenes left to add some zombie noises into and then it's just the sound effects and soundtrack.

It's taking forever to finish this movie. I said that shortly after wrapping in the fall of 2013, if we don't get the dubbing done in the next month - it's going to take forever...and it did and still is.

It's because of this movie I gave up filmmaking as a hobby, not because the actual shoot itself was terrible, in fact when it worked it worked great. I loved working with the actors, even the few times where scheduling was a bit of a pain in the ass, it was still a decent experience. It's all the crap that came before and after those parts.

I've stated all this before, but I'm stating it here as I'm going to link this to the Indiegogo site for an update as well. We were 3 months late in shooting in 2012, we were waiting on a grant that was massively delayed, as a result we had slightly less than 2 months to shoot a feature movie, called Undead in the Water at that point - and I had to get all the FX done and prepped as well (since that was what the grant was for). We shot for a month doing the scenes that had little FX, only to have two lead actors have to drop out which meant all that footage was useless.

In the rush to get somewhere near completion things just went south so badly between scheduling, weather and some uncooperative extras I had to scrap it. It sucked, but at the same time it was good. It was because of the time I had to spend on this I missed out on attending HalCon that year and business suffered a little because of it. This is another reason I'm quitting filmmaking, it's an expensive hobby with no return and takes too much time away from my business which is my only source of income.

BSo now we were guaranteed to be a year behind schedule. I rewrote the whole thing - twice actually, the original second version (called Moonshine of the Damned now). This version require new and different FX, meaning a portion of the grant money was wasted in the initial attempt, I had to raise a little more and luckily it all worked out. There were more scheduling issues which forced a 2nd, shortened version of Moonshine of the Damned - which was fortunate since there was no way I could have raised enough to do that version.

We shot the shortened version of Moonshine of the Damned over the course of the summer of 2013. It went pretty smoothly from what I recall, there were no last minute actor drop outs - although there were some recasting issues. We had an incredible bunch of zombie extras this time around making it much easier as well.

However, when we finished we were all a little exhausted. I was busy with work as well during the last couple months of the shoot and it was hard to finish up a final edit, which was of course needed before we could even think of starting on the tedious process of redubbing every single line of dialog in the movie. I don't shoot for sound, so it was all scrapped and redone - not the greatest method of doing it, but this is low budget crap folks, we do what we have to.

Being out in the country and not having a portable recording studio - because, let's face it, if I could afford a portable recording, I could have afforded to have the sound capture live during shooting - it was hard to get folks out here for dubbing. The edit wasn't finished until late November I believe, although there was a decent rough cut for viewing earlier, it wasn't good enough to start syncing up any vocals.

Then of course winter hit - and no one wants to come all the way out here in the winter and I don't really blame them. Eventually when spring came along in 2014 I was able to start getting some dubbing finally done - but for a lot of people involved, nearly 90% of whom have jobs and families, summer is a busy time of year, so this dragged out until pretty much until January of 2015. Combined also with the fact I had my busiest year ever, working nearly 20 hours a day, every day from August to the end of October - which wouldn't have been able to do if I was still trying to make movies.

That's it up to today, more or less.

Now it's on the the sound effects. For those who haven't really given it much thought, let this sink in a bit before asking how long it will take, I have to add every single footstep every time they're needed, every little creak, fart, whoosh and whatever. It's going to take a bit longer than five minutes, I can tell you that. Why wait until now to do it? I like to have the dialog in place and work the sound effects around it afterwards, doing it the other way around just creates more work since I would have to then readjust all the sound effects a second time had I done them first.

And then we're onto the soundtrack. I have several different artists lined up to hopefully speed up the process. My friend Scott Parsons will create a main theme and some variations, this will set the general tone of the soundtrack which the other artists will follow, having been assigned various scenes to work with.

All in all, it's been a hellishly long process. Not one that I particularly enjoyed but will definitely be glad to see over and done with. And the movie itself is actually a pretty decent, campy, stupid movie.

And, as a side note - the whole movie was nearly lost as the harddrive it was stored on nearly crashed on me. Luckily I was able to back it up and everything's safe and still slowly moving forwards.

When will it be done? When it's fucking done - that's all I can say anymore. It's a question I'm tired of, although I understand the asking, I just don't know. Hopefully soon and definitely this year.

Pinup Demon

This was a pretty quick and simple idea, just some very basic makeup and Heather, the model, already had the outfit - actually getting her hair done was the biggest issue, but it turned out awesome, so it was worth it.

I'm really impressed with how the horns turned out. I had done them as resin in the past and found that I could really only go so far with them - they'd just be too heavy and fall off. I had some extra silicone lying around so I sculpted a horn, moulded it in silicone and cast it in foam latex. UltraCal would have been too troublesome since it'd have to be a two piece mould, with silicone I just made a block, slit the back partway open and that was it.

I was a little concerned even with foam latex they might be too heavy, but the Pros-Aide  welded them on solid as soon as I pressed them into place. Worked out perfect.

And now I'll leave you with this one last picture.

Demon Playboy (Easter) Bunny

I had finished this post and did some details on the shoot, but then something happened and everything vanished and I don't feel like rewriting it all. But chances are no one would read it anyway, so here's some awesome pictures for Easter.

This shoot is the first in a small series of holiday themed Demon shoots, I'm not trying to directly depict the holiday or occasion per say, but do something that kind of represents it in a somewhat weird, Demonic kind of way. At least my kind of Demonic - sorry for anyone hoping for a Krampus photo shoot, not this time around.

And there you have it, a Demon Playboy Easter Bunny. I didn't want to do a Demonic rabbit, that's just too close to being a creepy-assed furry. The makeup was originally a little more elaborate, but because of scheduling we did another shoot the same day and I had to compromise in other to accommodate two different makeups on the same model in the same day in less than 6 hours.

War Elf

I started off this shoot wanting to do a weird video game-esque character with odd looking, almost useless, armor. I'd never used worbla before so it seemed the best time to jump in and try since I had a specific goal in mind. Over the course of working on it I did a few other shoots using it, still not sure if I really have a handle on it, but I have some better ideas of what do try next time if I do this again ever.

I wanted to shoot in winter, and had planned on doing this back in 2013/14 winter, but I just wasn't able to get things together in time.

I'm glad it didn't happen then because I didn't have this prosthetic at that point, which made this particular shoot much easier. I used the cowl from the Succubus shoot (same one used for the Demon Elvira shoot) and a forehead I'd made as a commission for someone else - this was a reject of it and it was in pretty bad shape, so I had to patch it up and whatnot. But the forehead design works great and totally flows into the cowl seamlessly.

So that's it. We got a few shots outside, it was a really nice day and the model, Ancelene, didn't freeze or anything - we're only about 5 feet from my house in these shots - one good thing about living in the country, you don't have to go too far to look like you're in the middle of nowhere.

Frost Troll

I did this piece a few months ago and because of the shitty weather and schedules I only finally got around to getting a shoot done with it today. And I am happy as hell with how it turned out.

A lot of the makeups I do lately have been pretty over the top and cartoonish - mainly because I like that sort of thing. This piece, which I wouldn't brag that it's ultra-realistic by any means, is still cartoon-ish in it's own way, but a little more of a character piece. It was inspired by the Troll designs from The Hobbit: Battle of the Five armies.

The idea behind the huge forehead nubs is that this a a more modern evolution of the Frost Troll, the ancient species was more bestial and had huge horns used for digging in the frozen earth looking for food.

And it's worth noting that the resemblance to Hellboy was totally unintentional, but kind of makes it cooler.

The Frost Troll prosthetic is available as a limited run piece for $60. It's a much thicker piece than I normally do, which does make it easier to remove with the edges intact.

And it gave me the chance to do a totally asymmetrical pair of ears, something I've never done before, nor have I (up until now) seen in any other shops selling prosthetics. The Troll Ears are a permanent addition to my online shop, they sell for $22.

If you made it all the way down here and feel you simply must get yourself all Frost Trolled up, feel free to email me at foxhenderson @ themonkeyrodeo.com to order your own Frost Troll and Troll Ear prosthetics. I will be selling them as a bundle for only $70, instead of $82.

Mini Mounted Cthulhu Head

I've been into make little mounted beast heads lately, one of those prop ideas I came up with years ago and threw on the backburner since I wasn't really sure how I could pull it off. I just finished my third one, a mini Cthulhu head. I've been keeping them small-ish to keep the price down since they do take a lot of time and money to make a single one.

I did a Pygmy Blood Troll and an Albino Cyclops Faerie, so Cthulhu seemed the next logical step.

I had recently purchased a small jar of Glow Worm, from Smooth-On, it's a really strong glow-in-the-dark powder that gave me the idea to give him glow in the dark eyes just for fun. I wasn't going for an ultra-realistic final piece, but something slightly cartoony and stylized - it kind of has an unintentional Mike Mignola feel to it I think, which I'm pretty happy about.

I wanted to keep the paint job bright and simple as well, I didn't want it muddied down with excessive details and colour schemes, just a nice bright, clean green with a little red and yellow accenting - again, keeping it cartoonish.

The eyes just pop into place, I don't bother gluing them or anything - since I didn't want to risk getting glue everything pressing the eyeballs into the sockets, but they didn't need it anyway, they slip in really easily while the latex is still fresh-ish, it tends to stiffen up a bit after a couple days from the mould, which should hold the eyes in as well as anything - but I'm sure if you go looking to jab them out, you probably can, like anything if you want to destroy it, it's pretty easy.

The glow-in-the-dark effect is pretty awesome, the Glow Worm is really bright and even obvious in broad daylight if you're in shadows. Overall I'm really happy with how it turned out, it's a totally different take on Cthulhu than I usually do and I think it's one of my better pieces.

I'm selling them in a limited run of 10 right now, $85 each. I'll be selling a small handful at the few Cons I attend each year as well. The plaque is almost 7" and the head itself is around 6", made from latex skinned polyfoam. Comes with the hanging hardware already attached, so it's ready to hang right out of the box.

Albino Cyclops Faerie

Mounted Albino Cyclops Faerie head.

Made of latex and filled with polyfoam and a resin eyeball, the head measures 2 1/2 inches long and comes mounted on a stained plaque with mounting hardware attached. $27.50 +shipping.

A rare mutation of the Seer Faerie, a species with prophetic abilities. It's unclear whether the mutation is caused by a genetic disorder in the parents or something environmental that results in these unusually violent creatures.

While the Seer Faeries abilities are usually limited to minor visions of random future events, the Albino Cyclops Faerie's abilities are limited to only seeing the death of any number of random individuals - it's thought that the constant visions of death is what drives these creatures to madness.

It's also believed that if an Albino Cyclops Faeries prophesies your death, the fate can be avoided altogether by destroying the creature, possibly resulting in immortality.

Latex Masks available this year!

This post is a little premature, but I wanted to post something. I decided this year I'd start selling regular latex masks in my shop. I've been meaning to for some time now, but there was just never the time or something else always came up. I don't know.

These here are the first group that'll be going up for sale. The lower centre one is a test painting version that I'll be keeping for myself.

The idea with this shape came from seeing some LARP orc masks, no full neck with the chin and lower lip cut out - it means no Batman neck and you can totally eat, drink, whatever without the mask interfering and depending on the colouring, it can blend in decently well to give the illusion of a prosthetic. I thought it was brilliant and since I hadn't really settled on a specific design or methodology behind what masks I'd make, this was my starting point.

Things just keep coming up and taking up more of my time than I'd planned so I just haven't been able to crank these things out like I'd planned. But the mould is all done and I'm going to do them in small runs - since I don't have the space to keep a pile of them around and stored properly.

I'm planning two versions of this mask, haven't decided on a name yet, there'll be a caucasian flesh toned version - meaning it should blend in naturally with worn to the wearers exposed chin and neck. And I'll be doing up a red version, which I can supply some red creme makeup with to make it ready to wear right out of the box, the customers won't have to buy anything additional.

They're designed off an average sized male head, so that's who they'll fit. They might require a little padding in the back of the head since it can slide forward, impossible to fix that any other way since it'd require the mask be skin tight (and utterly uncomfortable). It's an issue I've noticed with all latex masks.

I'll be offering up blanks for sale as well, I know there are some folks out there that like getting them just to practice or they like customizing these things themselves. The finished versions will be $90 (plus shipping) and the blanks will be $45. I'll only be making about 20 of them at most I think, all depends.

So I'm hoping the rest of this week goes as planned, amidst sculpting other stuff, organizing photo shoots and actually doing them, to some small custom jobs, we'll just have to see what happens.

Since I'm only selling them in small runs, I may only sell them on Etsy, but with a link from my own website, it's easier when selling small numbers. I'll play it by ear for now I think and see how it all works.

I'm also planning to do female versions as well possibly, or at least do masks fitted for women (or smaller heads). These are way too large for the average female head so I thought I'd do up male and female versions.

I think they might go over decently well in the Haunted Attraction community as an alternative to makeup. They're easy to slip on and off, if cared for could last years - way cheaper than silicone masks so it's less of an investment. As awesome as silicone masks are, I know not every Haunted Attraction can afford more than a couple before it's just too expensive unfortunately.

By Friday you might see four of them online for sale, all depends on how this week shapes up. And over the course of the year I'm hoping to release 5 more different masks, 3 male sized ones and 3 female sized ones - and of course one of those sets will be an obligatory zombie design.

Demon Elvira

For some reason this idea never occurred to me earlier. I was trying to think of iconic female characters that could easily be Demonized and that would be recognizable to a wide audience - Elvira of course is a brilliant idea. So it took a while to organize, but it eventually happened.
 

The hardest part of this, oddly enough was the dress. Amidst all the other overly skankified Halloween costume you'd think an Elvira costume would be simple, it normally is cut pretty low, but the costume version was cut just below the collar bone. We had to adjust it in order to accommodate the massive prosthetic boobs I made just for this shoot.

They weren't properly fitted to the model, Heather, but they worked pretty well in the end. In fact none of the prosthetics were fitted to her, not the boobs, not the cowl or the brow - but it more or less worked and I'll admit there was some photoshopping to clean up some problem areas.

I have a couple more that turned out really well I might do up at some point to use for some odd purpose, but for now I'm settling on these.

Wall mounted Pygmy Blood Troll Head.

I came up with the idea for making wall mounted beast heads years ago, of course I never got around to it and since then I've seen several others making them - that's always annoying. However, I finally got around to it, it was mostly the finer details of reproducing them consistently that stopped me from doing it right away.

The biggest stumbling block for me ended up being two relatively simple things, the plaque itself and the eyes.The biggest problem was sourcing locally and then sourcing within Canada online. Neither really panned out in a way I felt would work for me without driving the cost of the final piece up. Then I suddenly happened upon some small plaques that were very inexpensive and it went from there.

As for the eyes, I didn't want to paint them, so I wanted something I could just plop into place. I found some glass black glass beads that would give the troll that soulless look. The tricky part was designing all this to be done with just a single mould with a minimum amount of work involved to reproduce the piece.

So I took one of the stones, glued a wooden stick to it. Because that how you make eyeballs, right?

I made a mould of that and created to silicone copies.

 So I could sculpt around them to create a socket and pull them out without distressing the sculpture.

It worked perfectly. It took less than a day for the sculpt. I pretty much just made it up as I was going. I knew I wanted a fat little weird troll-like head and that was it.

I was happy with the result, and that it didn't take me days of agonizing over details to get it to turn out. From there I made a stone mould, with a flat back to it, drilled a hole in that and the mould was done in less than a day as well.

I thought the best and least expensive material would be latex filled with expanding foam, I'm used to it and I had all these supplies onhand already, so that was a pretty easy choice.

And there you have it. I had minimal cleanup around the edges, no other post-mould adjusting, cleaning or detailing to do, I just had to paint it, glue in the eyes and stain the plaque and mount the sucker. It was a lot more work than I'm making it sound, but it's fairly easy work overall, just takes a couple hours to produce one of these - unless I do them in bulk.

So yes, I am selling these. At the time of posting this I've just made the first prototype one, I'll be running off a couple more and doing a run of 5 for now and seeing how well they sell. Now that I've done the whole process and know my costs, I came up with a price of $40 for each one. Anyone interested can contact me, themonkeyrodeo@gmail.com.

So, after all that, what is a Pygmy Blood Troll? Here's some information on this ugly little critter.

The origins of this vile species is rather complicated. While most all creatures of Demonic origins are peaceful, docile beings, Pygmy Blood Trolls are quite the opposite.

It begins with the Blood Parasite, a leech-like worm that is responsible for most modern Vampire myths. They infect a living host, leaving them mostly dead in all appearances, using their bodies to then feed on blood from living victims. Normally this process simply works with the parasite taking over the internal functions of both Demons and Humans, Humans being much more susceptible because of their weaker physiology.

Demons are more resistant to the Blood Parasite on average, 27% of all Demonic species are completely immune to them. Trolls specifically are immune to Blood Parasite, however one species, Earth Trolls – who can hibernate deep in the earth for hundreds of years – actually absorb the Blood Parasite.

In most cases the parasite is simply consumed internally with no ill effect, however in pregnant Earth Trolls, the fetus is bonded with the parasite, altering its entire biological structure. One Pygmy Blood Troll (called as such since they never grow over a foot tall and most trolls range from seven feet to several hundred feet tall) is a somewhat hazardous nuisance, several are a much different matter. Pygmy Blood Trolls procreate much like modern day rabbits, within months there can be as many as one thousand.

Pygmy Blood Trolls usually feed on smaller animals, but have, on occasion, attacked larger creatures in packs. They are incredibly dangerous in high numbers since their Trolls physiology makes them strong for their size, and very tough to kill. The Blood Parasite physiology makes them very fast healers and immune to pain – it’s is believe the only true method of killing a Pygmy Blood Troll is to decapitate it and burn the body immediately. They will also, like their parentage, burrow deep into the earth where they can hibernate for hundreds of years and are near impossible to find in this state – this makes controlling Pygmy Blood Troll outbreaks a very difficult task and on that must be handled immediately before they either procreate or enter hibernation.