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| Background from Vertigo spread in Alfred Hitchcock: The Master of Suspense: A Pop-Up Book (Simon & Schuster, 2006). |
Vertigo is just one of my many favorite Hitchcock thrillers. And I wanted to recreate the memorable image from the poster art of the silhouetted man falling. I decided that instead of using the brilliant orange and white from the artwork, I would mute the colors and antique them, so I kept primarily to metals for the body of the spider.
I started with a gold-tone faux pocket watch pendant for the background of this spider. I antiqued the watch with copper (closest to resembling orange) paint and a light blue patina, then drilled a hole through the center. Next, I used silver solder wire, curved it into a spiral, then hammered it flat. I painted the spiral with a white gold paint (to mimic the white spiral from the poster) and added the light green patina. Creating such a tiny version of the man was the hardest part. I cut around the image of the man over black Shrinky Dink plastic using a [really dull] X-Acto knife. This would have been a much smoother process if I had used new blades and wasn't working with such a small, detailed image. Shrinky Dink plastic cracks easily, so after a couple of failed attempts, I finally had something I could work with. Before shrinking the plastic, I paper-punched a hole in the center of the man. In the oven, the plastic shrinks to one third of its original size. I was lucky that the man shrank to a just-right size for my piece. I used a black head pin and black seed beads to connect the man to the spiral to the watch background and ta da--a spider with moveable parts.
This is my favorite spider so far.
Materials: watch pendant, solder, paint, patina, Shrinky Dink plastic, head pin, black seed beads, bone seed beads, black and orange bugle beads, gray E beads, rusted wire
