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Bartleby

This was my first attempt at creating a character from a Kevin Smith movie: in this case, Dogma.  Of course I pick the character with wings and battle armor.
 
The head is actually the second one I used to make a Ben Affleck, who plays the Bartleby in question.  When I saw the movie Final Fantasy, I immediately forgot the name of the heroic tough guy and just called him Ben, because he's a dead ringer for Ben Affleck.  I bought the Final Fantasy action figure of him, ripped off all that "armor" on the figure, then set to work on making it into Ben.  Alas, something wasn't quite right.  Eventually a friend ended up buying Dragon Toys' "Ben" P-40 Fighter Pilot on his own, and cast the head for me.  So I admit that I didn't sculpt this likeness entirely, except to embellish the chin and redo the hair to match Ben-as-Bartleby.

 
I had to keep the feather bags well away from my cat while working on this, for obvious reasons.
 
Originally I intended the "battle armor" to be made of Sculpey, and nothing else.  Unfortunately the piece falling one time from a short table was enough to convince me to (first, repair the broken piece, then) cast it in resin.  Bartleby has two pieces, actually:  breast and back, so I had to sculpt and cast both.  After several unsuccessful attempts to find a spray paint reflective enough, and that didn't make the resin tacky, I covered the "armor" with extra-shiny chrome bare metal foil.  The pieces were attached using two scrap elastic bands from a random soldier doll's accessories.  Lots of straps, those soldiers.
 
The shoulder pieces are nice and complicated.  After trying several methods, I ended up cutting up thin, clear, and most importantly, flexible pieces of plastic into increasingly small half-circle shapes.  They were held in the correct position while being glued to each other.  Then the whole piece was covered with a single sheet of extra-shiny chrome bare metal foil.  Krazy Glue then held them to the main armor pieces.
 
Ah, yes, the "chainmail."  Two levels of nylon mesh, turned 45° to itself, then spray-painted silver, cut, and glued.
 
I ended up having to sew the maroon shirt from T-shirt material, since I couldn't find any scrap shirts that worked.

The wings, the wings... A lot of bags of white craft feathers, trimmed to size, then glued onto what I thought would end up being a fully-mobile understructure.  See, I assembled a "skeleton" of universal joints and rods into a wing-shaped sctructure, then glued stretchy fabric to that, and started adding feathers.  Alas, looks ended up superceding functionality, as the more feathers I added, the less mobile the "wings" became.  They're no longer retractable, then, but locked into place with glue.

Would you give this to Ben Affleck if you met him?
Of course!  But my chances of meeting him are only slightly less probable than my chances of ever fitting into a size medium T-shirt again.


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