My wife and I are pretty big fans of Halloween, so naturally we wanted an October wedding. We sought out a kind of dark elegance with our decorations, with my dearly beloved finding a very stylized zombie wedding cake topper early on that became her absolute heart's desire. Naturally, we could find no way to actually buy the item in question, and from what I could tell, it looked to have been sculpted out of fondant anyway, while we were looking for more of a keepsake item. Luckily, my bride trusted in my artistic abilities to recreate the topper, customized to us.
I used the lid from a tin of cookies as the base, punching holes through it with a nail which let me secure armature wire bent into the appropriate shapes for the figures' "skeletons". Once I had the pose just the way I wanted, I built up the forms with alluminium foil, an old art school trick to cut weight and save clay. A layer of super sculpey let me work in a higher degree of detail than the original's fondant had allowed, but I tried to err on the simpler side when I could, to retain the lighthearted vibe, though I would love to do something like this as really rotten undead.
The cat is a representation of my wife and I's cat, Freddy. I had originally sculpted a much different, more realistic version of Fred in mid stride, but in the end, the stylized bride and groom called for an equally stylized cat. with all my detail in place I painted the piece using acrylic craft paints, a favorite medium of mine, as it dries very quickly, allowing me to work fast, and mixes well, even accross different brands, which especially appeals to me, as I mix practicly all my colors from a few primaries. I even ended up using a gloss gel medium to create the texture on the top of the bride's dress to simulate the beading on my wife's actual dress. I used some very faint dry-brushing with very close colors to create just a hint depth, but for the most part the simple art style dictated a very clean, almost cartoony look. I am very pleased with how it turned out, and we've received a lot of compliments on what is now a very interesting mantlepiece decoration.
Copyright © 2012 by Joseph Geidel. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission.