If you made it to Monsterpalooza last month, you probably saw Mike Hill‘s superb “Aurora Wolfman” statue in the hairy almost-flesh. I couldn’t make it, having used up all my vacation time for my HowlCon trip, but friend of Werewolf News @Hoof_Pony was there to save the day.
On statues and displays like this, I’m always interested to see how detailed the hands and feet are. Heads and faces seem to get 80% of the effort, since that’s naturally where everyone focuses, but sloppy or indifferent work on the rest of the figure can hamper the realism and squander opportunities to embody character and personality. Hands are huge expressers of personality! Seriously, see if you can identify your friends and co-workers by their hand gestures alone.
Incredibly, Hill didn’t cut corners anywhere. This Wolfman looks completely real! Here are four close-up photos Hoof_Pony took of Hill’s amazingly life-life work. Click to embiggen.
Hill’s had a lot of experience creating displays like this. On his Facebook page, he discusses his motivation for building this one, based on a 70’s Aurora model kit.
It was the later 70s and I was 6 years old when my mum brought home The Wolfman model kit for me. Its an amazing memory. I owned a Wolfman!!! To my young mind this thing was incredible, lifelike, scary…and cool!
So a few decades later and I’ve decided to homage my favorite model kit. For Monsterpalooza I’m creating a life-size version of him, looking from the eyes of a child, how I pictured the real life version of the model kit.
Unlike a lot of my work that has the usual focus of trying to get these things extremely close to the actors and makeup (with a little edge of realism thrown in) this is proving to be very liberating.
Realism is obviously important to Hill, but for this statue he wanted to stay true to the basic pose of the model that inspired him, to the extent that he kept an unpainted version of the original model on hand for comparison.
You can see many more great photos of this Wolfman statue on Hill’s Facebook gallery, including some frankly astonishing close-ups of the facial details. You can also visit Hill’s web site for more information on the man himself.
Many thanks to Hoof_Pony for sharing his photos, and for letting me vicariously experience Monsterpalooza through your camera lens every year!