Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Are You (Victoria) Mock-ing Me?

I have a younger sister named Victoria and let's just say she makes stuff. She's always making stuff.
It would be an understatement to say she makes "dolls". Or that she "sculpts". She is the MacGiver of finding household or thrift store things to create her many homunculi.

Here are just a few:





Victoria has always been the 3-D member of the family. Not only does she frequently astound everyone with her fantasy and science-fiction themed sculptures, but she excels at set design, miniatures, costumes and making props for her partner Rob Lanning's films at Merninja Productions (where she serves as executive producer.)

Whether it's designing and putting together suitably sensational Halloween costumes, or decorating and painting a dull apartment like a Tuscan home, she seems to have a bottomless genius for transforming the ordinary into the beautiful or fantastical. (She actually found a cheesy fiberglass fireplace from a thrift store and turned it into a work of art. When she was done with it looked like it had been imported from an Italian villa.)

 Me, I just draw and paint stuff.

Victoria began to make her sculptures for the fun of it, and of course the joy of it turned into a full-time job and she began Victoria Mock Studios, in which she makes a continuing parade of ethereal fairy tale ladies, mythical creatures and outer space monsters. She frequently takes commissions, transforming people's favorite characters (or their own creations) into sculpts. She surprised me this Christmas by turning my own character Swamp (from my graphic novel, Heaven and the Dead City), into the very first "action figure" based on any of my comics. (She said she wished she'd given him "kung fu grip", and wouldn't that have been cool...?)

The page of the graphic novel the pose
(left) was based on.
Swamp from my Heaven and the Dead City.
Sadly, without kung fu grip.

I'll just let you feast your eyes on a gallery of her creations. You can inquire about commissions here or here, and make sure to visit her Etsy store!

Before we get to the eye candy, here's some behind-the-scenes of the making of a dragon...

 
 

                                           And some familiar faces and characters:

It's Harry Houdini, ladies and gentlemen! (who sold very quickly)
(Hmm, wonder if he managed to get out of his shipping box before it arrived to its destination?)
Pilot from Farscape.



Illyria from Angel.
Kosh from Babylon 5.

And... um... Robot Monster? (This is Rob's fault.)








And finally, yes, that is a unicorn horn that Victoria constructed for Rob's truck. You see, it's also the fab Uni-Truck, which features in the hilarious web series, Unicorn Hunters, about an inept team of paranormal investigators, directed by Rob and with lots of goofy visual input from my sister.
                                                                              Watch it here.

 And drop my sister a line and express praise for her homunculi before she makes a voodoo doll of me. (She does have some of my hair, and like everything else lying around the apartment, this has a chance of becoming part of some faery or creature.)

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