Saturday, 5 April 2014

The Finished 'Grom-zer'


Grom-zer

Transforming a Gromit Unleashed model into Bitzer from Shaun the sheep.


Gromit Transforms into Bitzer

 

As a little memento from my time at Aardman, I took my Paint my own Gromit. (From 2013 Gromit Unleashed exhibition that helped to raise money for Bristol's children hospital) I began to transform Gromit into Bitzer, by cutting off both ears and sanding down to spikes on his collar. I even applied Milliput to the noise to make it a lot larger.


To make the figure more like Bitzer, I spray painted the entire figure in 3 different shades of yellow to get the colour just right. Even had a spare Bitzer to make sure I got the right colour.


When I was back in 'sunny' Stoke, I continued the model by painting fur green to look like grass. A little thing I picked up when I was in Bristol.


 

To recreate Bitzers ears and other objects, I simply created them from super sculpey and baked until hard. Once hard I sanded down the pieces to make them even and smooth.


Below shows Bitzers slowly transforming with his; new teeth, nose, ears and platform grass.


For a tiny watch I started by sculpting the face from super sculpey. I added the numbers and hand detail with a permanent marker, and added clear epoxy to create a glass effect.


Miniature props


For this project I decided to learn how to knit, with a little help from May Jay when I was down Bristol. I managed to get some sort of a hang of it! Below are about 6 rows of my first attempt, the hat ended up being too big for Bitzer so needed to start again.


For my second attempt I brought thinner wool that was a lighter blue. I ended up changing the pattern slightly to make it smaller. Once I was happy with the size and shape, I added a bit of foam in the hat to keep it ridged and painted it to help define the different stitches.



Bitzer Hat


To see the entire model of Bitzer I completed visit the following link:

Bitzer Model