Selected Classwork

Most of the semester in ET 25B were spent building the Hulk. But once we had finished with him, we were given the opportunity to pick another project (with the instructor’s approval) and show everyone what we could do with something that was our own choice.

As always, I was most interested in producing something that I might have a use for. So that sent me checking through scans of Oz characters. I’ve done a couple of apocryphal Oz books, and there is no telling whether I might end up wanting to base some other projects on that universe. We were warned that trying to do “beautiful” or “cute” was going to be harder than ugly game monsters.

Well, one thing the Oz universe has no shortage of is grotesques. Some of them would give any ugly game figure a run for its money. I ended up with several candidates.

I actually needed a Woozy the most, but the Woozy’s design is more simplistic than the instructor was likely to go for, and while I wouldn’t have objected to redoing my original Sawhorse (since it really isn’t particularly good), he wasn’t likely to go for that either. I’d already done reasonably usable kitbashes for some of the major Oz grotesques, but I was not at all averse to building something to replace any of them.

The instructor accepted my proposal to try to build a pumpkinhead. The one I’ve been using is based on a very old commercial figure (from 2003) which doesn’t actually have a body. It was a rigged suit of clothes with a pumpkin head and twiggy hands. Once one turned the original clothing invisible and tried to put other clothing onto no body, it tended to result in things collapsing when posed.

Mind you, what I ended up with is not suited for rigging or further development. But I saved an earlier version of it, which might be fit to work with, in some misty distant future.

So here is Jack Pumpkinhead, circa 2017. Since I was using a drawing of him which showed him with the Sawhorse, I ended up redoing the Sawhorse as well.

And, yes, I know that in the books, Jack's head is described as not hollowed out like a Jack-O-Lantern. The child who created him, had heard of Jack-O-Lanterns, but clearly had never seen one, and didn't know to do that. But John R. Neill always drew him hollow-headed, so I didn't fill his head with pulp and seeds.