Our latest Kick-About prompt made my 3D-fingers itch: something about James Gillray’s physical deformations and soft, pink colour palette had me defaulting to this technique, in which you ‘free-build’ out of pads of stuffed nylon and use a needle and thread to ‘sculpt’. Next, you use PVA glue to harden the object, and then you can get on with painting.
Handy for me that Gillray’s cartoons extend to images of guillotined heads being displayed on pikes (meaning I didn’t have to give time and energy to fabricating bodies). My husband said, ‘It’s Mrs Thatcher!’ and there is a touch of her Spitting Image puppet about this luckless aristo-king.
Le raccourci (“the shortened one”) is French Revolutionary slang apparently, and refers to the fact that the condemned were, quite literally, “shortened” by the guillotine…
Red's Kingdom 
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