He has undoubtedly touched your life and the lives of most everyone you know in some way. He is an icon and I think he may be a vampire or some other life sucking entity. (He's a real living mutant and his super power is longevity). I saw him in person at a convention a while back. Perhaps he drains a small amount of life force from each person he takes a picture with. It's just a theory, but it would explain so much. Well anyway I made this bust of Stan Lee. It's my very first mostly foam sculpture. It was also the first art piece I finished in 2016. I have a small stockpile of styrofoam blocks I've collected and I needed/need to sculpt things out of them. I was thinking of what to make and then I watched Disney's Big Hero 6. It was a pretty good movie, but I loved the Stan lee cameo as the janitor's father. (Stylized representations of real people are so fun.) That's where I got my inspiration for this and this image is pretty much the only reference I used in making it.
If only I could have found some more angles, but Google image search failed me. More likely I just got impatient and wanted to start sculpting.
1. I started out with a block of Styrofoam. I found these at a store and they were just throwing them away. I'd say they are about two feet tall by one foot square. Then I drew Stan's face on it so I could get a rough cut out of the shape. Some people think it looks like Bill Murray (@BiIIMurray). 2. I used my handy dandy Hotwire Foam Factory cutting tools to cut out the basic shape. Now foam is a massive mess to sculpt, but the HWFF (#hotwirefoamfactory) tools are great at cutting down the level of mess. The hot knife and the bow cutter are invaluable. I'm plugging them because they make an Above Average product right here in the good ol' USA! 3. I still used the hot knife a lot for the detail but you need to get messy and break out the metal files, rasps and sand paper to really get some detail out of the foam. Sculpting is all done now, but there is more. 4.Styrofoam will dissolve if you use spray paint on it. At the time I wasn't sure how I was gonna paint this, so I coated it with wood glue. You can buy some better stuff from HWFF to coat your foam with, but I'm cheap and I have a lot of wood glue. I use Tite Bond (@titebond). It's like the best stuff ever. If you paint it on like... PAINT. It'll dry hard and give your foam a protective shell.
5. Painting is just painting. I painted the thing with acrylic paint. (BORING!)
6. I hope I got Stan's epic shades close to right. There is no place on the internet that sells oversized novelty Stan Lee glasses. So I had to make my own. Well... I modified the only oversized novelty glasses I could find. I used some plastic to form the bridge and my rotary tool to carve the frames then sanded and painted them gold. I used a coat hanger for the wire arms of the glasses. 7. The base is made of wood and isn't really interesting, so I'll skip it. I did ad a cool glittery Stan lee Autograph to it though. I used an old shirt to add a nice 3D cloth touch to the neck area as well as covering up the seems were the foam meets the base.
Well that's enough explaining. Here are some extra pictures of Stan from several angles if you care to look.
My girlfriend stole this and took it over to get signed by Stan Lee at a convention. She just walked up and skipped the line. Got him to sign it and got to meet him. Pretty girls just go where they want. She gave it back to me signed with a letter of authenticity.