Making Talos Awakes: Hand & forearm restoration

Making Talos Awakes – Part 8 of 20

Ray’s Talos sculpture

In the 1990s Ray made a sculpture of Talos as the original had fallen into a poor state and he wanted a more permanent reminder of his appearance. On page 217 of The Art of Ray Harryhausen, Ray described him as a ‘bronze statue imitating a huge bronze statue’.

The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation loaned Raven Armoury the original mould of this statue, to produce a limited edition of sculptures in bronze. Raven Armoury cast the waxes for this edition directly from Ray’s mould. They also worked with the Foundation to produce a half-sized rendition; realised by moulding a 3D print of a digitally reduced scan of the sculpture.

Talos is available as a limited edition of just nine full size bronzes and twenty five half size bronzes.

Hand and forearm reconstruction

Ray lends a hand or two

This sculpture proved invaluable in the restoration of Talos as the animation model’s hands were beyond reasonable repair. The Foundation kindly agreed that we could use hands moulded from Ray’s statue. We felt it more in keeping with the spirit of the project and more respectful to Ray to use his own work rather than creating entirely new hands.

Hand reduction and forearms

In comparison with the original, the new hands were too large to use as direct replacements. So Raven Armoury moulded the hands and cast waxes using a high melting point wax, which results in greater shrinkage. They then moulded the waxes and repeated the process tree times. At each stage they cast resin hands to gauge progress towards the required size.

Shown below are the three stages of reduction above a cast of the animation model’s hands. They clearly show the extent of the deterioration in March 2014.

Once I had hands of the correct size I needed to remodel them (see below) to correct shrinkage to the width of the fingers, the depth of the palms and the outside profile and heel of the right hand. The wrists of the animation model are bigger than Ray’s sculpture so I used larger wrists.

Hand and wrist transplants

To correct the size discrepancy between the reduced wrists and those of original, I prepared two hollowed halves for each wrist using four resin casts from the first stage of reduction. I reduced the wrists to pegs and roughly fitted the larger wrist halves (see above).

Next, I glued the hands to the front halves of the wrist pieces, which I then glued to the model’s lower arms once I had cut the pegs to size. I had to pay close attention to the film to establish the correct position, as the right wrist had split and lengthened over time.

I then fitted the back halves, the left requiring a much bigger section. Lastly, I transplanted in smaller grafts to correct the remaining alignment issues (dark green).

Forearm finishing

I used a die grinder to add a level of texture to the forearms then, with reference to film footage, I wax-filled and built up the forearms to blend with existing structure before modelling to a finish consistent with the original surface.

Exact texture matching between the wax and resin surfaces was difficult to gauge at this stage. I established the final surface texture of the forearms at the end of the repositioning process.

These sculptures were hand made by Raven Armoury in association with The Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation.
Based on effects characters created by Ray Harryhausen for a Charles H. Schneer Production.
TM & © Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved.