Wind in Stone

One of the joys of the art of sculpture is conveying invisible forces with the medium of solid rock.

With his sculpture "West Wind," Thomas Ridgeway Gould (American, 1818 – 1881) achieved the impression that thin fabric is stretched over a human form and blown by the wind. 

According to Wikipedia, "His West Wind, originally sculpted in 1870, stirred controversy in 1874 when it was denounced as a copy of Canova's Hebe (below), with the exception of the drapery, which was modelled by Signor Mazzoli."

"Animated newspaper correspondence followed this charge, and it was proved groundless. Gould declared that his designs were entirely his own, and that not a statue, bust, or medallion was allowed to leave his studio until finished in all points on which depended their character and expression."

"West Wind was later shown in the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, and all told Gould subsequently made seven copies in two sizes."

Sculpting a Bobble Head Dog

I made a little bobblehead sculpture of Smooth to give my son for his birthday. (Link to YouTube)

 

There are basically two types of bobble head designs: 

1) Head on a loose, bouncy spring, which works for upright human characters.

2) Head on a counterweight, which works best for animals.

With type 2, the trick is to make the head light enough to balance against the lead weight, so I used craft foam for the head. You also have to sculpt the hollow body with enough space for the counterweight to swing freely up and down and side to side. 

All the materials are linked in the description of the YouTube video. 

Vinnie Ream's Statue of Lincoln

To get a healing break from the images of chaos and violence in public spaces, I've been trying to take a minute to focus on the beauty of the art in the Capitol building, which I remember making a pilgrimage to see with the same kind of reverence that I have experienced in cathedrals.

A full-figure marble statue of Abraham Lincoln is one of the large sculptures in Statuary Hall, and there's a remarkable human story behind it.

The sculpture was commissioned by Congress from an 18-year-old young woman named Vinnie Ream.  According to the Capitol campus's art curators:

"Ream had previously shown her ability to depict the president in a bust that she created from life in Washington. Her selection, however, was accompanied by controversy because she was young, female, and had friendships with members of Congress."

She developed the sculpture first in plaster as was the practice. In the sculpture, Lincoln's right foot is forward and he's holding a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. His head is tilted forward with a serious expression. 

But Ream's sculpture was almost destroyed. During the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson in 1868, her family played host to Senator Edmund G. Ross. Ross was the Senator who broke with his party to vote against the removal President Andrew Johnson after he was impeached by the House. 

According to Wikipedia, "she was almost thrown out of the Capitol with her unfinished Lincoln statue, but the intervention of powerful New York sculptors prevented it."

Ream was a prodigious talent. She had trained with sculptor Clark Mills and with Luigi Majoli in Rome and with Léon Bonnat in Paris. She brought the Lincoln sculpt in Rome, where it was carved from Carrara marble with the assistance of Italian stone carvers. The finished statue was brought across the Atlantic and unveiled in 1871. 

After her early period of sculpting she had a 40 year gap in her productivity as she took on the obligations of being a wife and mother.

"When she married Lieutenant Richard Hoxie in 1878, he imposed restrictions on his wife's work as a sculptor. Their son, also named Richard, was born in 1883. In addition to her work in the U.S. Capitol, Ream's sculptures include her statue of Admiral David G. Farragut (1881) at the well-known Washington landmark, Farragut Square. Ream died in 1914 in Washington, D.C. Her grave in Arlington Cemetery is marked by a replica of her sculpture Sappho."

Wikipedia on Vinnie Ream

More from the Capitol campus's art curators

The White Rabbits

Sculpture of Columbus by Mary Lawrence

Sculptor Lorado Taft needed assistants to help him carry out the decorations for the Horticulture building at Chicago's Columbian Exposition in 1893.

Horticulture building at the Columbia Exposition

Unfortunately all the qualified male sculptors were already occupied with other work. The deadline was approaching and he needed to complete the project in time.

Taft realized he had plenty of talented women among his students at the Chicago Art Institute.

Lorado Taft and his students at work, 1899

He asked Daniel Burnham, director of public works, if he could hire women to help him on the official project, a practice virtually unheard of at the time.



Burnham told Taft he could "hire anyone, even white rabbits, if they can get the work done." (Link to video)



The team of women promptly dubbed themselves "The White Rabbits," and successfully completed the work. They became some of the leading women sculptors in America, including Julia Bracken (1871–1942), Carol Brooks (1871–1944), Ellen Rankin Copp (1853-1901), Helen Farnsworth (1867–1916), Margaret Gerow, Mary Lawrence (1868–1945), Bessie Potter (1872–1954), Janet Scudder (1869–1940), Enid Yandell (1870–1934), and Zulime Taft.
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White Rabbits on Wikipedia
Online article on the White Rabbits

Chinese Tomb Guardians

Tomb guardians in ancient China from the 7th to 9th century A.D. served to protect the living from wandering spirits of the dead, and to protect the tomb from robbers.

Some of these molded earthenware sculpts were composite figures that included qualities of human and animal forms.

According to Wikipedia, the earth spirits had animal bodies "often including wings sprouting from the tops of the forelegs.

"The heads are often different, with one semi-human and another perhaps based on a snarling lion. Both have horns and crests like flames or huge cockscombs."

Unglazed face of an earth spirit of the semi-human type

Read more on Wikipedia: Tang Dynasty Tomb Figures

Making a Hollow-Mask Illusion

The "Hollow-Mask Illusion" involves tricking the viewer into thinking a negative form is positive.

Creating this effect involved:
1) Making a negative mold from the face of the original sculpt (which is by Jake Hebbert). I used Magic Sculpt for this.
2) attaching that to a positive sculpt of the base
3) Lighting everything in the scene - except the hollow face - with a light from the upper right. I used a gobo on a wire to block light on the hollow face.
4) Lighting only the hollow face with light from the lower left, using an oval mask to shield everything else.


A computer generated version of this is called the "Rotating Mask Illusion."

You can make your own interactive version of this out of paper. 
Magic Sculpt

Richard Teschner's Puppets

Richard Teschner (1879-1948) was an Austrian puppeteer who adapted the Indonesian rod-puppet tradition for European audiences.



His puppets were briefly featured in this British Pathé video. (Link to video)



The puppets are operated from below by rods rather than from above by strings. According to Brittanica, "The puppets were controlled by a central rod and had a network of internal strings to manipulate hand and leg movements, bending to the front or back, and sensitive facial expressions.



Teschner was also a gifted illustrator. Here is his character Zipzip.

Zipzip as a rod puppet

Teschner was inspired by a trip he took to the Netherlands, where he saw Javanese puppets brought back by Dutch traders.

Wassermann from "Prinzessin und Wassermann," 1913

Teschner believed that human voices interfered with puppet drama, so he performed his puppet shows in pantomime, with music box scores that he composed to match his exquisitely crafted characters.

"Bologneser Hündchen," 1929

A dog character with lots of fringes that would move with the main action of the puppet.

The Red from "Nachtstuck" 1913

An exhibition of the work of Richard Teschner took place a few years ago at the Theater Museum in Vienna.

Learn more online
Monster Brains (blog post with a lot of his illustration work)
50 Watts (with more info about his puppet theater)
Clive Hicks-Jenkins Artlog
Britannica on Teschner (biography)
Indonesian rod-puppet tradition (Wayang) on Wikipedia

Queen Catherine Statue Scrapped

Audrey Flack, now 86, had nearly finished working on a gigantic bronze statue of Queen Catherine for public display in Queens, New York. But protesters blocked the project, associating Catherine with the British slave trade. Sadly, the sculpture was ultimately stopped and the bronze casting melted down.

“I was crushed — it really just killed me,” said Ms. Flack, who said she had devoted nearly a decade of work to the statue, the most of any piece in her career.
“I researched her, and if she was a bad, evil person, I would not have done it,” she said of the queen. “She was a good human being.” Ms. Flack added, “She had dark Portuguese skin and was made fun of for that.”
Ms. Flack said she had visualized a prominent memorial to a strong woman in a city with very few female statues.
“I was told at the time that it would have been the largest public art statue made by a woman in the world,” she said, “and second only to the Statue of Liberty in height.”
Ms. Flack went on: “As a woman and an artist, I wanted a beautiful, intelligent female out there. Queens has the greatest ethnic diversity of any borough, and I wanted her to be a healing force bringing people together.”

Read the rest on the New York Times website

Paint a Monument Results

A few weeks ago, I announced the "Paint a Monument Challenge," inviting you to sketch an outdoor sculpted statue or monument. Many of you faced challenging conditions — including 15 degree Fahrenheit temperatures with blobs of snow landing on the sketchbook!

You came up with some wonderful results. I loved reading not only about your plein-air experiences, but also about the fascinating stories behind the statues. It was really hard to choose the winners, but here we go:
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Grand Prize Winner

Matthieu Borter

A stylish and expressive solution that's in keeping with the subject.

"The subject matter is not exactly what you would call a monument in that it is not a single sculpture erected in a public space in order to commemorate an event or a person. Rather, it is one from a pair of statues sitting at the entrance of a famous shintō shrine in Kyoto, Kitano Tenman-gū. (As a side note, I was actually married in Kitano Tenman-gū.) Such pairs of statues, representing two semi-fantastic creatures, the shishi, or lion, and the koma-inu, or ‘Korean dog’, are found in every shrine throughout Japan, and are thought of as guardian protectors, usually situated at any threshold outside and inside the shrine." 

"What is striking with this particular pair is how ‘untraditional’ it is. Traditional lion and dog pairs are usually smaller than human-size, carved out of stone or wood, and retain a more traditional appearance. Here, both statues are made out of bronze; at a huge scale; and while the shishi is thought to have derived from actual lions, its traditional iconography was handed down from Chinese models, as an actual lion was never seen in Japan before the 19th century. Here, it seems that the traditional shishi was fused with western examples of lion monuments."

"My sketching tool is a yatate, a portable inkwell filled with sumi ink ground on an ink stone, and paired with a calligraphy-style brush that is kept in the handle. This tool was used as far back as the 15th century, but nowadays yatate are generally thought of as antiques more than anything else. They still offer one of the most compact sketching kits imaginable, and allow to safely carry an expensive brush that would normally not leave the house. This was only my second attempt at sketching using a yatate and I cannot say that I took advantage of the versatility and expressive potential of the Japanese brush and ink."

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Finalists

Breno Macedo

Superb handling of light and interesting color gradation between warm and cool. I like the way he bleached out the lights. I also admire the variety of the edge around the vignette.

"For my entry, I picked this statue in front of Trianon Park in São Paulo, Brazil. I walk by it almost everyday and there is always an appealing light striking it in the afternoon. My medium of choice was watercolors which I find the fastest to work with. I thought it would be interesting to work with the cool and warm shades, which is always a tricky thing to do because I wanted to avoid muddy colors (my previous attempt was a mess D: ). The hot pressed paper won't allow much margin for error so worked on those lights in a single layer, from the blue hues at the top."



"The challenge was a great excuse to paint this subject and it was a lot of fun. I look forward to the next ones!"
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Silvana Rusan
Carefully observed forms and textures, with a sense of setting and time of year.



"For my monument painting challenge, I've picked a wooden totem sculpture outside the Richmond Art Centre in Richmond BC. I used gouache paints and synthetic brushes on 7x5" black 80lb acid free cover stock."



"I really enjoyed this painting, as it was interesting to notice how from top to bottom the tones of the wood became more cold, since the bottom of the sculpture is more exposed to moisture."
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Susan Otten

What a sad story, and at the same time, what a tribute to the devotion of the parents. 

"Here is a painting I did of the George Blount Memorial. It is a headstone of a five year old boy that died falling from a second floor bannister in his parents hotel in 1876. His parents, a prominent family in Columbus, were devastated by the loss of their son and created this monument in his likeness."

"It is located in the Greenlawn Cemetery in Columbus, Ohio and "Georgie" has become a popular fixture in this park-like cemetery."

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Rozene Janette

The watercolor and gouache technique gives you a good range of descriptive options for the bronze and marble. The bust seems to be a respectful tribute from one artist to another, and you've added to the chain.

"This memorial to the artist and architect Richard Morris Hunt was designed by the sculptor Daniel Chester French. It is installed in the wall of Central Park across from the Frick Museum on 5th Ave. and 70th St. Hunt designed the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I sketched it in watercolor with white gouache."

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Diego Fishburn

This rendering captures the weight and power of the bronze.

"The stars aligned, with this challenge. I travel to Barcelona often for work and have always wanted to paint the lion statues around the Christopher Columbus monument. It has a constant flow of tourists, and on the day after Catalonia declared their independence, I only had this beautiful, sunny Saturday. Painted in Gouache with Cobalt Blue, Burnt Sienna, a bit of Cad Yellow, and Titanium White."

"Incidentally, it was the video of the painting Mr. Gurney made a few years ago, of the horse and rider statue, that made me decide gouache was worth a try. Thank you James for your generosity and inspiration. Best spot was on the floor with a little shade from a light post. Luckily, I never got stepped on."

Honorable Mention: Video
I love the video and the art you did, as well as the story of the way your son joined you on the adventure.


(Link to YouTube)

Alexandre Magnin
"The statue I sketched for the challenge is called "The Secret" by an artist called John McKinnon. I chose this one because it is a statue I see almost every day going to the playground with my 2-year old son, he likes it a lot and he was excited to see it painted in my sketchbook :-) To make the challenge even more fun, I put together a short video (1'40") documenting the process: https://youtu.be/vEVvfkZ6Blw. I used mostly watercolour in my Moleskine watercolour sketchbook (8.25"x5") and added a touch of gouache at the end to suggest a few leaves."

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Be sure to see all the entries on the Paint a Monument Challenge page on Facebook. Thanks to all who entered.

Attention Winners (and Honorable Mention), please email me your mailing address (gurneyjourney at Gmail) so that I can send you a "Department of Art" patch, and let me know what video download you want. 

Sculpting from the Inside Out

Brazilian sculptor Juliana LePine creates a tiny figural portrait of singer Freddie Mercury. She builds the forms from the inside out: putting teeth on the skull, flesh on the bones, and clothing over the flesh. (Link to YouTube)

Juliana has a whole series of tutorial videos grouped into playlists. You can get her supplies from the JLS Store, including plastic vitrox (PV) clay, skeletons, and eyes. You can even get molds for making your own skulls and figures.
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Juliana's website

Paint-a-Monument Challenge

Public statues and monuments have been in the news lately for political reasons, but we haven't seen them as much from the artists' perspective. So I invite you to paint or draw a statue near you.


Here in Kingston, New York, we've got three 11-foot bronze statues, including one of the first governor of New York, George Clinton (1739-1812). There's an interesting backstory:

"The 1898 monuments are the work of noted sculptor John Massey Rhind (1860-1936) and were produced by the Gorham Manufacturing Company in New York. The statues were originally located [in the] Exchange Court building in Manhattan. When that building was being remodeled in the late 1940s, the sculptures, unbelievably, wound up in a junkyard as scrap. Fortunately, after seeing a newspaper article about the building remodeling, Emily Crane Chadbourne, president of Kingston’s Senate House Association, tracked down the junkyard and sought to rescue the statues. She purchased and donated the statues to the city of Kingston." link for source.

You can paint the statue by itself or in its surroundings. You can paint it objectively or infuse it with your emotional reaction. And you can use any medium, including sculpture.

If a statue in your area has been removed and all you have is an empty plinth, you can invent a sculpture of your own imagination to replace it. You can be whimsical or serious with this one, but try to be convincing in how you render it. There will be an alternate "Plinth Prize" for this category. For inspiration, check out the "Fourth Plinth" tradition London's Trafalgar Square.

Lioness and snake by Diego Sarti in Montagnola Park, Bologna

My hope that we can really look at these statues in public places, and appreciate the pure artistry and craft that goes into them, apart from—or perhaps in addition to—their symbolic or historical connotations.

Rules
• It's free to enter and anyone can enter.
• Subject can be any statue or monument presented in a public place. It can be in bronze or marble, free-standing or bas relief, outdoors or indoors.
• All drawing and painting media are acceptable: casein, gouache, acryla-gouache, oil, acrylic, watercolor pencils, watercolor, pencil, or charcoal. If you wish to sculpt a 3D maquette in clay, Sculpey, or wax, that's also acceptable.
• No limitation on palette colors. You can paint in black and white, a limited palette, or full color.
• Just shoot two image files: 

      1. Your finished painting, drawing, or sculpture, and 

      2. A photo of the work on the easel in front of the subject. Your face doesn't have to be in the photo unless you want to.
• Upload the images to this Facebook Event page:

• Please include in the FB post a sentence or two about your inspiration or design strategy, or some information about your experience sketching the statue, about the artist who created it, or about the subject of the monument.
• If you upload to Instagram or Twitter, please use the hashtag #paintamonumentchallenge
• You can enter anytime between now and the deadline, Friday, November 3 at midnight New York time. If you do more than one painting, upload only your best and delete any previous entries.
• I'll pick one Grand Prize, five Finalists, and one Plinth Prize winner. The winners will be published on the blog GurneyJourney. All the winners will receive an exclusive "Department of Art" embroidered patch. In addition, all the prize winners will receive one of my videos (DVD or download) of their choice.
• Winners will be presented on the blog on Monday, November 6.
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More
Facebook Event Page: Paint a Monument Challenge
The Making of a Bronze Statue, (highly recommended) a 1922 silent film by the Metropolitan Museum that shows the arduous process.
Thanks, Studio Maywyn for the idea.

Is Mount Rushmore Unfinished?

The original design for Mount Rushmore showed far more of the figures, as suggested by this preliminary maquette. 

I have digitally superimposed the actual carvings of the faces over the maquette. Susan B. Anthony was supposed to be included, too.

But by 1941, federal funding was cut back, and the sculptor, Danish-American Gutzon Borglum, died of a heart attack while the work was still being carved.

This video has aerial shots that show more of the setting.

(Link to video) Video by Smithsonian.

Read more about the design history of the monument at Time.com.

Woodcarving a Seated Figure

This video (link to YouTube) shows how British sculptor Guy Reid (b. 1963) uses photographs shot at different angles to find the silhouettes of his sitting model. He cuts the shape out of wood with a band saw. Then he refines the 3D form with wood carving tools.

The video itself is remarkable for the way it eschews voiceover and music, letting the visuals explain the process instead.

Build method for dragon or pterosaur maquette

Bluworm, also known as the Lone Animator, shows a method for building wing bones and membranes, using wire, latex, cotton, and plaster.

His build process would work well for a dragon or pterosaur. He's constructing a stop motion puppet, but his method would work equally well for a posable maquette that you could use for an illustration reference.
(Link to watch video on YouTube).
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Previously: Skybax maquette

Two sculptors create each other's portrait

In this demonstration, two master sculptors create clay portraits of each other in real time. The artists are Professor Sarath Chandrajeewa (Dean Faculty of Visual Arts at the University of Visual and Performing Prt in Sri Lanka) and Professor Cao Chang Xu (Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China).
(Link to view video on YouTube)
Via Best of YouTube

Non Finito

Artists have left works unfinished inadvertently because time, the weather, or death called them away. Such partially completed works often provide insights as to how they were executed.

The non finito (literally "not finished") style is different, because the artist deliberately leaves parts of the piece uncompleted. 

Danäid, 1889, Auguste Rodin (source)

Rodin's Danaïd, above, is a mythological woman who despairs from her punishment for killing her husband. Her hair merges with the water that she has spilled on the ground, and the curve of her back almost seems like a part of the landscape, merged with the rough marble. 

Michelangelo (left) and Donatello are also notable for their non finito sculptures, where the figure sometimes seems to be contending against its imprisonment in stone.

The non finito style often conveys a particular attitude of the artist toward the piece, suggesting ease, effortlessness, or informality. It has the effect of sprezzatura, which might be translated as studied carelessness. 

It can also express a mystical sense of transformation reminiscent Lao Tzu's admonition to "return to the state of the uncarved block." 

Studied non-completion is a common device among contemporary realist sculptors and painters, with many academic ateliers exemplifying a style where the rendering is deliberately left unfinished.

The Metropolitan Museum will be hosting an exhibition called Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible March 18–September 4, 2016 with 197 works at the Met Breuer.

Read more:
Catalog of Met exhibition: Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible

Wikipedia on sprezzatura, unfinished creative work and non finito

Online academic essays: Facilità and non finito in Vasari’s Lives. Carlos Montes Serrano
                      The Process of Artistic Creation in Terms of the Non-finito
GurneyJourney on sprezzatura

Previous posts on unintentionally unfinished works:

Unfinished Alma Tademas

Menzel's Underdrawings

Examples of non-finito on Pinterest

Lao Tzu, chapter 28 of Tao Te Ching 

John Rogers, Sculptor for the People

John Rogers was a late 19th century sculptor who was as well known and beloved in his day as was Norman Rockwell in his. 

He sculpted table-top sized figural groupings based on literature or the Civil War. He then had a team reproduce them in plaster. The casts were painted in brown or gray tones so that they wouldn't show dust. 

The plaster casts sold for about $14 —about $425 in today's dollars, so nearly everyone could afford one. Rogers produced about 80 different subjects, with about 80,000 reproductions in all. They showed up in shop windows and homes everywhere. Even Abraham Lincoln had one.

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Resources

Wikipedia on John Rogers

John Rogers.org -- a website with inventory for sale

John Rogers was a 19th-Century Sculptor for the Common Man

In 2012 the New-York Historical Society had a retrospective called John Rogers: American Stories

...and there's a catalog: John Rogers: American Stories and a book: John Rogers: The People's Sculptor

Getting a Likeness at Madame Tussauds

Madame Tussauds created this video about how they create a wax portrait figure. They had the benefit of having the subject, Benedict Cumberbatch, available for measurements and color matches. (link to video)

One of the readers of this blog is Jethro Crabb, a painter and sculptor who has worked at Madame Tussauds. I asked him a few questions prompted by the video.

James Gurney: Who sculpted the head in the video?

Jethro Crabb: "My friend John Cormican, a lovely fellow and a veteran of Jim Henson's creature shop amongst other places, sculpted the head for the Benedict Cumberbatch figure."

JG: Where is Madame Tussauds based, and what did you do there?

Jethro Crabb: "The studios are based in Acton, West London and produce wax figures for all the worldwide attractions. Each figure normally has two sculptors working on it, one to sculpt the body and one the head. I specialised in head sculpts during my time there."

JG: Do you ever use 3D scanners?

J. Crabb: "Tussauds to me is fascinating because most of the techniques involved in the production of the figures are exactly the same as they were 200 years ago. In the last couple of years 3D scanning and printing has become a part of the process, but the 3D prints are currently only used as another reference tool for sculpting in clay by hand."

JG: Do you always have a living celebrity available to pose?

J. Crabb: "In the case that the celebrity was free and willing to meet us, we would travel to them and take hundreds of photographs and measurements of them. For the head we used an eyebrow pencil to draw a matrix of dots on their faces which became points to measure from. As we built the clay head up using the photographic reference we established these points in the clay using metal pins and carefully measured between them with calipers. We would compare these measurements with our chart of measurements taken in the sitting and adjust them until correct. Two of the photographs we took were a 'front on' and a 'profile' shot in the right facial expression from 5 meters away (to minimize the distortion)."

"These were printed out 2% larger than life size and we used this to directly take measurements in a very specific way. The clay head was built 2% larger to compensate for shrinkage in the wax cast. In the case that the celebrity didn't want to be involved or was unavailable we would work from photographs alone. Each portrait would normally take 5 weeks to sculpt. All these techniques and processes were tinkered with and added to over the years and the results produced could be quite remarkable."

JG: What elements are key to getting a likeness?

J. Crabb: "One of the things I learned as an artist working at Tussauds was that in order to create a convincing likeness of someone it was crucial that all the elements were correct and had the correct relationship with each other. Humans are so expert in recognising faces, or more accurately 'heads' since the shape and silhouette of the cranium, neck and jaw play an important role in this recognition, that any minor mistake or mismatch of forms creates a disproportionately disastrous result."

"I also learned more and more that it is the big simple shapes in a sculpture which are the most important to establish correctly. There is always a tendency to be distracted by an alluring nostril shape or mouth corner, but even if this small stuff is correct it is useless unless it is laying over a correctly sculpted larger form. Perhaps a similar thing can be said of painting."

JG: When it comes to recognizing a particular face, I have always been under the impression that the great portrait painters engage in subtle caricature (see post on "Caricature and Likeness") or at least are selective about downplaying certain features or qualities that are not particularly characteristic. Am I right in understanding that there's none of that going on with Madame Tussauds sculptures? Are you going for a metrically exact mirror image with no attempt to exaggerate characteristic details?

Jethro Crabb: "This subject of 'caricature vs exact copy' that you bring up is one that absolutely fascinates me. Your question and original blog post has hit upon an issue that I have spent a lot of time thinking about and experiencing through my sculpture. Please excuse my lengthy response. It should be an easy question to answer, but it is not."

"At Madame Tussauds, the sculptors are aiming to produce an exact copy of the person. So that you could stand the celebrity next to their sculpture and it would be impossible to spot any differences in size, proportion, form or colour between the two, (By the way this aim is rarely if ever 100% achieved no matter how meticulously the wax figure is made)."

"But in order to get to that point I think it is helpful to have a caricaturist's eye. To have the ability and inclination to notice what specific characteristics are key in making someone look the way they do. This skill is particularly important when we have been unable to meet the celebrity in question and are just working from photographs without the aid of measurements taken from the subject. In this case it is useful to observe which characteristics of their head shape and features and they way they fit together are distinctive and might be exaggerated if we were to make a caricature. By noticing these characteristics we can make sure they are stated clearly enough in the sculpture. Better that they are slightly overstated than understated."

Wax portrait of Beethoven by Jethro Crabb

JG: With movie celebrities or larger-than-life historical figures, our notions of what they look like is influenced by a certain amount of myth-making via film or painting. Sometimes the screen persona of a movie actor is kind of artificial, and different from the real flesh-and-blood human being. How do you factor that in?

J. Crabb: "A good wax figure should look like how people expect that celebrity to look. This can often be subtly different to the reality. Think about having your photo taken and having a feeling that it didn't quite capture how you really look. This could easily be the case with a wax figure as well. We could create a sculpture that measures correctly and adds up with all the photographs from the sitting, but just doesn't look like how we expect Johnny Depp, for instance, to look. So sometimes we have to choose photographic reference which tallies with our expectations. On top of this some of the best portrait sculptors at Tussauds use elements of subtle exaggeration in their modelling to define the characteristics of the forms and shapes in the face. Two of the principal sculptors used to work as caricaturists for the British television political caricature programme "Spitting Image" and I think this has helped with their realistic work."

Thanks so much, Jethro!
Jethro Crabb's sculpture work 
Celebrity Tussaud images are from FanPop