Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

One of the things I’ve discovered is that the absolute worst thing you can do when you’re in pain is exactly what you want to do — relax. Because as soon as you take a break and relax, the pain quickly starts to take over your entire field of experience, it’s essential that you stay active. Of course there are limitations, because you can’t do things that make the pain worse, so you can’t be stupid with your make-work projects, so in my case, being mobility limited, when I’m not feeling well enough to read or write or otherwise consunme my mind, I enjoy casual sculpting.

As some of you know, I’ve been binge-watching all the Star Trek media — recently I’ve re-watched all the movies, all of Enterprise, all of The Next Generation, have two seasons of Deep Space Nine remaining before I re-watch Voyager and finally the original series. Inspired by that, I decided to make a series of little fridge-magnet sculptures inspired by alien races on the show. These are all made with “FIXIT”, a two-part polymer clay (imagine something like Fimo that doesn’t have to be baked, but instead hardens on its own after an hour), with neodymium magnets embedded inside them. They’re then painted with model paints (I swear by the little Vallejo bottles) and sprayed with a gloss coat that both protects them and makes them shine.

Click to take a much larger look at any of them — so far I’ve made an Andorian (the Andorians really came into their own during Enterprise with Thy’lek Shran becoming one of my favorite characters), a Benzite (think Mordock), a Bolian (think Mott the Barber), a Borg, a Cardassian (both Garak and Gul Ducat are favorites from DS9), a Ferengi, a Lurian (think Morn, the big dopey guy that hangs out at Quark’s bar), and a Klingon (I kind of mixed Worf’s forehead with Gowron’s crazy-person glare).

These were fun to do and I might do more. I’ve done loads of other little fridge magnets in the last while — after the break I’ve posted quite a few more, all created in the last few days.

This series are some animal inspired ones I’ve made — a beetle of sorts, a bird that started out as a duck but quickly became something else, a narwhal (much cuter in person), a piggie, and a walrus. Following in the “cutie” meme, I also did a “food” set, including a carrot, an orange, and a radish. I might do more but they’re kind of generic and I’ve seen other people make almost identical pieces. Again, click on any of them to see them with zoom-vision.

Here are a few faces — the “Pringles guy” and some random idjit. I already have a fridge full of faces so I haven’t made very many new ones recently. I also was going to do a series of body parts, but didn’t get any further than making an ear and an overtly Goatse symbol.

Finally, whenever I make something I almost always have a little bit of clay left over. Usually it’s just a little, in which case I just make some random little shape and drape it over a magnet, but at other times I have a larger lump which gets a larger treatment. The bigger two are very vaguely inspired by the cell drawings that kids do at school, the other one, just some random shapes…