For our series “It Will Be Ours,” our concept involved a woodland woman with an elongated body and limbs that seemed to emerge from the natural world around her. We decided long stick fingers would be ideal for the actress to wear so she could ominously reach forward with one hand and drag her other hand along the wall behind her.
I began by creating wire frames that fit over my own fingers. I used myself s a fit model and left room within each structure to allow for variances in the differences between the actress and myself. I knew that our cracker-jack make-up artist JiHyun Kim uses a heavy duty surgical glue that could (possibly) be use to build skyscrapers and suspension bridges, so I felt confident it was OK to allow extra room.
Above shows how the wire support structures were made and how they attached the sticks. I made the leaf buds by melting tiny plastic leaves with a hot glue gun & quickly applying the gooey plastic to the sticks. A bunch of old fake strawberries were repurposed to become mushroom clusters to grow out of skin.
The next step was adding the clay to the wire forms. For this I used Magic Sculp. These were designed to hang from the actress’s fingers using thin wire rings.
The next step was to apply these on set. Below is JiHyun, our hair & make-up artist working her magic.
This shows the talented model / actress Alexzandria Jade on set wearing my stick fingers and the amazing living dress created by Kaytee Papsuza.
The final image called “Reckoning,” featuring the stick fingers.
More about the creation of this series will be posted soon.