Life got in the way for a while, but I finally found the motivation and momentum to complete this project! The finer details, like the trimming on Woody’s cowboy hat, really brought it to life. Now I’ll have to see if my artwork meets the approval of the harshest critic, my three-year-old niece.
To infinity and beyond! Buzz is now finished, even if he looks a tad creepy at the moment with his blank eyes. After I finish the finer details that are too fiddly to do with fabrics, next is the assembly time, where I put the top and bottom halves of the artwork together on the background, and pray that they fit.
After I blitzed through the top half of the artwork, the more detailed bottom half with Buzz is coming along at a slower pace, mostly because of my changed work hours and good old-fashioned procrastination. Every time I look down at what I’ve managed to complete after five or six hours of work, I think to myself, is this all I’ve done today? However I am quite happy with the way it’s looking so far.
With plenty of free time and nowhere to go, I’m off to the flying start with this one, completing what usually would be a month’s worth of work in a week. I already had leftovers of about a hundred different shades of silk and satin, so I had to make very few trips outside for the supplies. For now, I’ve decided to leave the small details (like Rex the dinosaur’s teeth) for later, since they’re too fine for fabrics and I’ll probably have to do them with paper instead.
Because of the restrictions, I lost the luxury of using my Mum’s nice big dining table, but though the conditions in my apartment are more cramped, it’s been workable so far. I had to tell off my cat a few times for jumping on the working table and sniffing around, but most of the time he just wanted to curl up inside my fabrics box. Any new box is an instant cat magnet, and if that keeps him away from more destructive behaviour, fine, have a nappa.
I’m making this one for my little niece, who loves Toy Story (my sister is also a big Disney/Pixar fan, so everybody’s happy). I found an existing Toy Story art that’s absolutely perfect for my medium, but I tweaked the colour scheme; less artsy, more kid-friendly. I’ve already done away with some smaller details (sorry Bo Peep!), but I suspect I’ll have to simplify this a lot more along the way, or do the finer details with paper rather than fabric.
Now I hope I can round up all the materials before the next wave of coronavirus measures closes down everything. A time-consuming indoor hobby would be really handy now that I have six weeks off work in the next three months, and a strong possibility of the Australia lockdown happening.
I continued my Disney exploration with this cute and quirky 2002 movie about a little Hawaiian girl who unknowingly adopts an alien creature from outer space. One of our heroes is a strange, angry, destructive force, another is shaped like a cross between a koala and an insect.
When this movie first came out, I must have gone, oh Jesus no, not another bloody animated film about cute talking animals, and skipped it. It however turned out to be a smarter and much more inventive movie than I anticipated, with the amount of social commentary that’s quite heavy for a kids film. While I found some of its messages rather muddled, Zootopia is a fun, charming, beautifully animated Disney flick that’s part fish-out-of-water, part mismatched buddies comedy, part detective whodunnit.
Solid if not quite spectacular effort from Disney. If nothing else I’m happy that I watched it at the cinema, because this movie really is exceptionally beautiful – and that’s saying a lot because complimenting an animated film on visuals is like complimenting big blockbusters on special effects: what doesn’t look great, these days? Yet the Polynesian-inspired world of Moana really does feel special and magical, or maybe it’s just that I can’t watch gorgeous tropical scenery and not think, I need a holiday and I so want to be there.
I think it’s pretty telling that the only time this Disney reinvention of the old fairy tale truly soars is when it recreates the classic cursing scene, in which Angelina Jolie’s Maleficent comes uninvited to the christening of baby princess Aurora to bestow a terrible curse. Dressed in black, eyes ablaze, with her naturally exaggerated features made even more striking courtesy of make-up master Rick Baker, Jolie looks utterly fabulous and alive and she visibly revels in the mayhem and revenge Maleficent unleashes. If only the rest of this limp if beautiful movie felt as spirited.
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