Morticia and More!

I have busily working on The Addams Family because I want to get it out as early as possible. I have learned from experience that it is not a good idea to release a holiday video on that holiday! For example, I released "Here Comes Peter Cottontail" on Easter day in 2009. The video barley got any views because people look up Easter songs in the first few weeks before Easter, not after. So it was up for one day and the next day everyone is over Easter and the video dies down and waits til next year. On Easter day 2010, Peter Cottontail got lots of views in the first couple weeks before Easter and then on Easter Day it got 3,000 views. The day after it got 200. So views drop dramatically after the holiday. I wanted The Addams Family to get a few good weeks before Halloween.

First I started off making all the clay characters out of Model Magic clay.

Top from left to right: Wednesday, Cousin Itt, Baby What, Thing, Fester, Gomez, Morticia (see next paragraph)
Bottom Row: Grandmama's Head, Pubert, Lurch's Head, Pugsley

I started by making Morticia. Morticia's dress is very iconic and i needed to get it perfect. For the most part, in the past, I have made dresses  that are very large and poofy at the bottom. Dresses like Belle, Tiana and Giselle are like this. It was very different making such a tight dress. I wrapped the dress in different ways than usual and folded and glued it down differently too. The very bottom of the dress has a circular area of frils and I cut out just that for the bottom. In the TV show, it took the actress 2 hours to get out of her costume. First she had to get the wig and makeup of her face. Then they took the frils off the bottom of her dress and unzipped it all the way up. It was very difficult to get out of and even more difficult to walk around in! I used a type of velvet to make her dress and I think it looked great! I painted her skin very light flesh color and made her arms out of wire. I attached a spider web fabric to her sleeves. The next day I added her hair. I used black yarn because I knew it would look good because I used it on Pocahontas. It looked very long and straight, which is how hers looks! Next I painted on the eyes with a toothpick. I looked at a picture of the movie version (Played by Angelica Houston) for the face.  She was done and I thought she looked great!

Morticia's Dress

Next I worked on Uncle Fester. He is a pretty simple character compared to Morticia. I started off by making his clothes. I cut out a black shall and glued it onto his body. Then I cut a strip of brown fun fur for his collar. Body done! Then I painted his face the pale skin color. Once it dried I made his eyebrows with a black sharpie. Then I painted dark purple circles around his eyes because Fester has deep,sunken-in eyes. Once that dried I painted on the eyes and made his smile. I wrapped his arms in the black fabric and attached everything and thought he was done. I put him next to Morticia and he was so small! His head was below her armpit!  So I showed him to my mom, who agreed he was too small. But she said that she remembered in the show, you could see his shoes. I looked back at Charles Addams cartoons and the pictures of the show and she was right! I quickly made short legs and feet out of clay and put them aside to dry.

Fester's Body

Finally I made Cousin Itt. Cousin Itt is one of my favorite characters, and in my head he was one of the easiest. I was wrong. I bought blond doll hair and started gluing it on with a hot glue gun. Naturally, there was wig hair everywhere. It was a mess. I would put a blob of glue on the top of his head and put the hair on it, but of course it stook up and I had to press it down, which caused me to burn my fingers on the hot glue. I got half way done and the hair was too thin. You could see the white model magic underneath and I would have to put another layer of hair on him. The plastic wig hair was melting and it was such a mess. I ripped it off his head, grabbed the whole pile of hair and threw it out. Starting over. I realized that the wig hair wasn't gonna work. I went through my craft box and found the perfect ball of yarn. I used it for Hera's hair in Hercules. The failure wig was bleach blond and straight. Cousin Itt's hair is more brownish- blond and wavy. This string was way better and looked even better. The one problem was I would cut about 10 pieces of hair, put a blob of glue on his head and then let it dry. These blobs started to add up and there was about 6 layers and the blob on top of his became a mountain of clear hot glue and it looked bad. I cut the blob off and made a new smaller blob and stuck all the hair to it quickly before it dried. Then I shoved his black bowler hat on his head and pressed down on it show the blob was compressed. It turned out pretty good and I put him aside.



The last thing I will write today is the making of Baby What. In the previous post, it explains who he is. I was about 2 1/2 cm tall and obviously the string and glue would be to difficult to to do on that small of a body. So I mixed paints together to make the right color and painted him. Once it was dry I used a brown sharpie to make hair strands. Finally I used baby pink paint to paint on his pacifier. He was done!

Baby What

 

Characters Done: Moriticia, Fester (except for feet), Cousin Itt, Baby What