The collar was only the appetizer for the main course! The corset! I worked on the corset through the month of December and a little in to January. I am afraid I did not calculate the time worked on it, so I can't say how many hours exactly I worked on it. BUT! I worked on the corset pretty much every day: 30 minutes during my lunch break during the week, and an average of 6-8 hours on the weekends... plus many more powerhouse hours over my Christmas holiday. Each row of beads took about 30 minutes to apply... so you can do the math ^_^;
Progress..... I covered an existing corset I had with the same silk as the collar, then added a flap of fabric and some snaps to hide the front closures. The musical corsets appear to only have a back closure. Since I don't have a professional dresser to put me in my costume each time, I chose this method to make it easier to get on and off as required. I started with the front middle row, then added beads to each side for balance.

As you can see, towards the end, I was nearly out of beads... so you can see the lower spine area has a real mish-mash of beads. I figured it was safe since the back is almost entirely covered with the silk drape.
Some fun facts:

There are OVER 4600 beads to the collar and corset combined!

I watched 3 seasons of Community, 1 season of Life, 1 season of Numb3rs, 1 episode of Bones during the making of this corset

My cats are still finding stray beads that escaped a the corset and rolled away

Aggghhhhh! My fingers! I spent all weekend sewing beads onto my collar for my Lioness costume. There's a good 16 hours of work there. Most of the beads were approximately 4mm-6mm long... so you can see why it would take some time to bead the whole thing! All of the beads are stone or wood (no plastic!). The collar itself was drafted from a duct tape pattern. I used Buckram as a base for stiffness, and covered it with a layer of silk so the buckram wouldn't show through. Once I had my collar I began beading from the middle, and worked outwards so I could match the pattern on each side.
After 7 hours of beading....
After 10 hours of beading....
Completed! At around 16 hours T_T
The collar was a nice prep for the corset, which I also have to bead. It is significantly LARGER... however I will be using somewhat larger beads as well.

Lion King Musical Lioness - head sculpting part 2

More sculpting for my lioness headpiece. Clay smoothed down and scalloping and texture added:
Mold was made with rubber latex. It's a lot slower process than silicone, you paint thin layers of rubber latex onto the piece over several days. When the latex mold was thick enough, I made a hard case in plastercloth to hold the shape:
Resin was poured into the mold and rolled around to make a hollow headpiece. In order to strengthen the ears, I added some rigid expanding foam:
Finish headpiece removed from the mold:
In order to clean up some of the mis-cast errors, I used bondo to fill pocks, then sanded down the fills to a smooth finish:
The head was added to a headdress. The headdress was made with twisted 16 gauge wire, and covered with twine to look more natural. I installed some strips of sheetfoam to the inside of the headbase for comfort: Next up.... painting!

Ermagerd! It's finally been posted! Eeeee!

I made two german shepherd partials for a DZ Deathrays music video. DZ Deathrays are a metal band out of Australia. This was a HUGE rush project that was secret secret.... I made both partials in a week back in August and shipped them off the Hayes Brothers Studio in New York City for filming >_<

The Hayes Brothers Studio pretty much contacted me in Mid August and said "We need these by the end of the week" How could I say no? I was a freaking MUSIC VIDEO!

Anywho.... the Hayes Brothers asked for two "Angry looking" German Shepherds who were going to get into lots of trouble. I didn't know they were going to be Cops until last week when they let me have a sneak peek of the video. I just made the heads, handpaws and tails...

VIDEO:



*sort of NSFW.... naughty dogs are naughty

**They also spelled my name wrong on the credits T_T it's Jopling not Joplin..... sigh.... T_T

I love the Lion King Musical, and I loved making Scar. I just couldn't help myself, I decided I HAVE to make a Lioness as well.
I've started sculpting a headdress for a Lion King Musical Lioness.... I still need to do some smoothing and add the markings, but I was mostly concerned at getting the shape down first.

There are two different kinds of lioness heads in the show (well 3 if you count Nala), the singers and the dancers. The singer heads are a full head which rests on the actor's head like an african headdress.
This is a dancer head, it's smaller than the singer heads as it needs to be light and easy to move in for dancing. The costumes are slightly different as well for the same reason.
The Dancer heads also do not "cry" like the singer heads do (I was awful tempted to add the cry feature, but I would like to go for accuracy at this point.

More progress to come. I have thousands of beads bought on ebay making their way through the mail for the corset (FFFfffff! there are literally THOUSANDS of beads on those corsets... I'm going to be busy for a long while sewing those on!). I also purchased some silk for the drape on the back of the neck. Yes, 100% silk.... darn broadway, you couldn't go with a cheaper fabric huh?
I do like how that one photo shows a glimpse of Scar in the background :3 He keeps me motivated.

Things I've been working on....

Oh so many suits.... I have been pretty lazy when it comes to updating LJ with my new works... So here's a whole BUNCH of them: Roosters and Dinos and hyenas! Oh my! RJ Rooster - RJ is a real handsome bird looking for a few chicks. There are 8 different furs, 2 types of fleece and even some green silk in this costume. The tail is super heavy, I have to wear a shoulder harness to keep it up :I Temperance 2.0 - My second incarnation of my fursona Temperance. I'm not totally in love with her handpaws, but her body came out juuuust right. The feet are attached to the body for a seamless appearance. Her toes are ABS plastic I vacuum formed. Eden - I finished making a hyena commission for someone and decided I wanted a hyena suit too >_< Although I used the same furs and head sculpt, I tried to make her look more feminine with some simple hair styling and some subtle burgundy accents on her body.

Another costume commission done. This is a basic wolf partial with arm sleeves. The head is made from an ABS vacuum formed base, with sensitive moving jaw and tear duct vision. As per the customer's request, I recorded the process of furring the head and uploaded it to Youtube in two parts :3