‘Ooooh… attend this record of Sweeney Todd, the way he looked before he went odd, for the time in the furnace proved such a pain, his posture will never be the same again…’

This was something I started working on over the weekend, after I got itchy fingers and really wanted to go back to trying my hand at sculpting.

The problem was that I literally had only a small blob of Super Sculpey left from my previous sculpting endeavours, so managed to get just his torso done while I waited for the new packet to arrive (which I found to be annoyingly stiff, thus hinting that it was not fresh and had been kept in storage for months… seriously people, learn from my mistake, be sure to check your Sculpey is soft before buying it!)

Anyway, so here I spent all too many hours crafting all the little details from the inside out (I generally work on the muscles first, then add the clothing, then all the finer details such as buttons, buckles, eyebrows, teeth and hair etc… last) only to have everything go disastrously wrong in such typical fashion at the very end of the process.

Despite having an internal wire armature, a solid foil base AND being rigged up to a sturdy metal support, he still somehow managed to fall flat on his face in the oven. GAH! So there goes his hand, ankles and a huge chunk of his hair. His tail is suddenly left half hanging off (and now I find his head is too). This is definitely what you call Sod’s Law.

Btw, these photos were taken just before he went into the oven, because I always think it wise to keep a record of such things just in case they get damaged… and in this case, they are all I have left of my efforts. Poor Sweeney… he would have looked great painted, but alas, it was not to be.

(Image © Leona Preston 2008).