James and the Giant Peach.

About a year ago I had made 3 masks of the farmers from The Fantastic Mr. Fox for Signstage on tour. This year the play will be James and the Giant Peach and I got an email asking for more masks. Excellent. They wanted 6 masks initially, the rhino was added along the way along with a giant "spanking hand." One of the aunts will chase James with the giant hand, about 4 times the size of a normal hand during the play.

Shown here are some of the things that went into making the heads and working out the final designs.

The maquettes of the grasshopper, spider, and worm. Thrown together quickly to show where I was headed with the sketches I had done. They've got some lines carved in that approximated what I saw as the pattern pieces for the foam masks.

The shark and rhino.

The cloudmen. You can click on any of the above for a larger view.

The final masks were created in sheet foam. RIT dye was used to color the foam and some airbrushing of details. Hard hat suspensions were used and will allow adjustment for the actors. You can view them in the sample puppet gallery on my website.

Once again the job was a fun time, and a welcomed change from the usual things I get involved with. No zombies. No extremely dangerous chemicals. Just a bit of contact cement fumes and scalding water with the dye.

Sorry there aren't any horror stories of things gone wrong. The worst thing that I ran into on this was sticking a T pin into my knuckle, painful at first, but it faded quickly.