The Tooth Fairy’s Castle
Commission for drag performer Hawkeye Fierce (@Hawkeyefiercedrag)
Ever wonder what the Tooth Fairy does with all those teeth?
There’s something incredibly fun about blending horrific or disgusting imagery like rotting teeth, with a whimsical and playful medium like claymation; the juxtaposition of the two felt like the right mix of surrealism, horror, and fantasy for an act about how unsettling the Tooth Fairy’s job really is.
If clay was the flesh for this project, then the bones were tinfoil. Aluminum foil allowed me to very quickly prototype the shapes I wanted, and to approach the forms that were needed without wasting too much clay. The foil had the added benefit of lending my structures a bit of extra sturdiness, which ended up being very helpful as I had many shapes sticking up directly into the air.
I really wanted to make sure the structure was clearly both a castle and a set of teeth— which turned out to be more of a challenge than anticipated. Teeth, as it so happens, are strangely both biomorphic and geometric in form and shape, and I found myself oscillating quite a bit between creating hard edges and softer, blended forms.
The breakthrough for me was treating each tooth like a tower in the castle— which of course meant carving little windows and steps into each one. Once these were added it immediately felt like both the tone and the scale were reading the way I needed.
The final decision was how to render the main entrance; I wanted something to illicit a drawbridge or raiseable gate of some kind, but also being acutely aware of the horrifying nature of the act itself I wanted to find the most unsettling way possible to include it— should the teeth move? Should they be in positions that felt unnatural? I finally landed on pushing one of the largest front teeth into a downward-facing orientation, to turn it into a kind of ramp that could lift up and over a mote if I so wished (I ended up not creating a mote for the castle, but the entrance tooth was still effective).
I wanted to use clay for this project in part to get the gums and teeth to look as organic as possible without being completely photorealistic. In order to get those gums to be super fleshy, I mixed in a bit of pink with my skintone clay, and after baking I gave it a few wash layers with reds and yellows and pinks to make it look more mottled. The teeth themselves were a blend of white and beige clay, which I then scored and distressed using an absolutely cursed mix of old watered-down paints and stale coffee. This worked particularly well in areas like the creases between steps and in the score marks I made along the biting edges.
Then there were the resin teeth; Hawkeye planned to use them for the act itself, and gave some to me to use as well. These were meant for dentures and were actual castings from real teeth, so they were quite fun to add into the sets I needed to build. I added them into flowers, furniture, and even made a little insect-like critter with one of the teeth and a set of fairy wings.
