The Strangest Stuff Comes from Iowa.

Here at the festival, we are getting ready to open our three outdoor shows and have gotten a little swamped with props!  Mostly from the show "The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa."  This week, we've been working on this guy:  a giant bust of Falstaff supposedly made of Cow Manure. 

It was carved from foam and coated in fiberglass by our prop department's own Annette Julien.  We then primed it to keep it from bubbling under the hot sun, and to keep the treatment durable for the outdoor show.  

Oh, yeah, it's also a working puppet and it sings. 

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So first to make some nice manure textured goop.  More complicated than you think.  It can't be too fresh and smeary, can't be too old and crumbly, and it needs that perfect cowpatty brown.   

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What's my secret poo recipe, you ask?  This recipe called for a little jaxsan, and little flex glue, chunky sawdust and tint.  For some extra "post digestive" realness, we also pushed in some curls of hay (not shown in sample at right).  

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We pushed, rather than brushed, the goo on by hand.  It was quite fun actually!  As we put the goo on, we pushed in the hay.  Lynn Jeffries, the puppet designer, had a lot of fun with this project and  asked us specifically to put some hay coming out of his ears.  We later added some dry bush variations in color as well as some shadowing and highlighting.  

And here he is!  
The finished product.  Making "John Falstaff" the butt of Iowa's jokes!  

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Detail shot!

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And that's how I made poo into art.!