Queen Bee Reveal - Speed Post: 1 of 12

Art starts in observations of life.

Hi, Everyone! I've been building like gangbusters in Halfland, so much so that I kept building instead of posting about what I'd built. This is the first of 12 "speed posts" to catch up on all the fun.

The garden inspo on the left, mock-up of the puppet to actual size inside the built floral stage on the right.

The other day in the garden under my precious pomegranate tree, I was thrilled to notice that (for the first year since planting the tree years ago), bees in the area had finally discovered it or deemed it worth visiting for nectar and pollen. Most years, the tree had produced an abundance of blossoms, only for them to fall without developing into my favorite fruits. The sight of seeing a collector bee deep inside a flower, brilliantly backlit by the morning sun, was like a magical stage show. The flower's petals behaved like a theater curtain of sorts as I delightedly watched the bee doing its thing at the center.

I had just begun building Halfland's Queen Bee puppet and decided right away to incorporate this moment as the character's reveal in the film. 

I came inside to scrounge around for suitable fabric to imitate the pomegranate flower petals/stage curtain. I tinted scraps of stiff linen voile in oranges and reds. That amount of fabric allowed me enough to make three blossoms, hyper large, merely very large, and only slightly larger than life. I carved three sizes of flower bodies out of soft foam covered in masking tape, layered with tinted wood glue until rind-like. The sets of six petals each flower were wired to position as needed for the scene. I took a pruned branch from a lemon thyme, stripped off its needles, and replaced them with my hand-painted pomegranate leaves. *** 

When I took my finished blossoms out to the tree to see how close to life I'd gotten, I was astounded by how wrong I'd initially gotten the color of the flowers and the proportions of the outer sepals and petals. I cut down the triangle-shaped calyxes and added the brightest of bright fluorescent orange watercolor to the red fabric petals to get them closer to right.

*** One note on how I folded the paper leaves may be worth pointing out; you'll see in another catch-up post how I have now made enough paper grass blades to cover the entire main set. In doing that, I developed a super-quick method for adding strength and structure to these shapes by folding a single pleat down the middle. I glued each pleat flap down in this case for a flatter leaf effect. And I left a long tail on each, rolling them up tightly with glue into a small stem to attach them to the branch with hot glue~. Painted the joins taupe and boom... a ready botanical close-up stage.

Last square above shows the Queen puppet sculpt at actual size. Molding and casting to finish her is next.

The finished branch set. 

It's for the Queen Bee reveal scene,

which takes place in the "Spring" sequence during the Dawn (Akt 1).

It's a brief close-up moment of encountering her silhouette inside the largest flower.

~ another small note to add that this was the first time I used silicone finger cots to press the hot glue joins flat (seen in use second row, next to last image, above) and it worked like a dream. This took me hardly any time at all to attach over 100 leaves to the floral branch. I always use a piece of silicone to marry the items I'm hot-gluing, but when you need to pinch-glue something, covering finger tips is the move.