A while back I made Jareth's crop out of a metal cane and existing crop and I had this nagging thought in my head telling me "I bet you could make this from scratch and make it even more movie accurate too...". So here's version 2, made completely from scratch with some wooden dowels, worbla, a contact juggling ball, and a few other bits and pieces.
Really thrilled with how this turned out, super satisfying to have created something so cool from scratch. Shout out to the amazingly talented Alyson Tabbitha for her Jareth costume tutorial on Youtube, which I used to make the Jareth shirt used in the first photo. The pic of me as Jareth holding the crop has become one of my favourite pictures that I've taken of my prop replicas, so glad that it turned out exactly like I pictured in my head. I'll put a few WIP shots below!
I used two dowels for this project, a a 7/8 inch large wooden dowel for the handle, and a 7/16 inch dowel for the rod part. I drilled into the larger rod so that I could slot the smaller rod inside of it, and both rods were drilled into so I could insert a wood pin to strengthen the join.
I added some wire to help form the "talons" of the crop, which was then covered by worbla. I also used a cut off bit of a wooden door knob to form a little trim piece for the end of the crop handle.
The crystal is a 50 mm contact juggling ball, which had just enough wiggle room in the "Talons" where I can squeeze it in and out to make painting easier. Just as an FYI, the crystal in these WIP pictures was a smaller one that I swapped out later, so excuse that continuity error!
I used my heat gun to heat/form the worbla, but I made sure not to apply the heat to the contact juggling ball as it was made out of acrylic and could deform with heat. I would use the heat gun to warm the worbla, then while it was still hot I would put the ball in place and form the worbla around it. Any blemishes on the ball (From either the worbla or the paint in the later stages), came off with a q-tip dampened with rubbing alcohol.
For this project, painting was using a filler primer, followed by a black glossy spray paint, followed by a silver spray paint, a wash of black acrylic paint to bring out the details, and some silver rub n'buff on the highest points of the sculpt.
Then I just wound the rod with some leather binding tape, patterned out the slappy bit of the crop, sewed a little pocket onto the slappy bit so that it could slot onto the crop, and then tidied up the join area with some waxed thread.
Once a scene ended, there was no hint of Jareth in Bowie, as his costar and coworkers are quick to state.
āDavid was really wonderful,ā recalls costar Jennifer Connelly, who was just fourteen years old when she played Sarah alongside Bowieās Jareth. āVery kind, and very funny. I was already aware of who he wasāI had started listening to his music. He became, subsequently, a hero of mine, based in part on my experience with him: the person that I met making Labyrinth, who who interacted with me, and the way I saw him interact with others. I watched him take the time to be kind to everyone around him. That really had a huge impact on me. I wound up becoming a huge fan of his music.ā
āHe wasnāt āstarryā at all. Just very normal, very pleasant to be around.ā - Toby Philpott (Puppeteer)
āIām a real self-educated kind of guy. I read voraciously. Every book I ever bought, I have. I canāt throw it away. Itās physically impossible to leave my hand! Some of them are in warehouses. Iāve got a library that I keep the ones I really really like. I look around my library some nights and I do these terrible things to myself ā I count up the books and think, how long I might have to live and think, āF@#%k, I canāt read two-thirds of these books.ā It overwhelms me with sadness.ā ā David Bowie.
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