Egytomania

Okay, so I told myself that I wasn't going to start on this yet, but....I sort of did anyway.

I spent the day sculpting some of the pieces for the headdress. My first sculpt was one of the little cobras for around the top.

I just love him, he's so cute! Then came some of the feathers for the back. Since there are two overlapping layers, I sculpted two different lengths.

I wasn't originally going to start work on the large top feathers, but once I worked out a gameplan, I decided to work on it anyway.

 This is just one quarter of the top piece. I'm going to make a silicone mold of it and cast it in resin so I can have identical copies for the two sides, front and back. I'll then make any needed tweaks, make a new mold, and cast it again for the final copy. So, there's lots of work still ahead of me.

I've also taken a bit of a diversion.  I mentioned on my Cleopatra post that I was in love with the movie The Ten Commandments when I was a kid. (Still am, really.)  There was a scene where they played a game called "Hounds and Jackals", which was actually a real game in ancient Egypt. I've wanted a set of Hounds and Jackals since I was a kid, and now that I've learned how the game was played, I'm finally going to make one for myself! I'm basing my set off of the one in the movie, which in turn seems to be based on, at least in theory, the one found in the tomb of Reny-Seneb, which was made of ivory and ebony like the one in the film.

This is the game from the film.  Isn't it lovely?  I started work on it tonight by sculpting the head for the jackal playing pieces.

It needs a bit of tweaking, but it's a good start! I plan to cast this fellow in resin and attach the head to a tapered wooden dowel.  I don't have a lathe, or access to a lathe, so I'm going to have to try and finagle something from ready made items. But first, I have to sculpt the hound, which I'll hopefully do tomorrow! :)