I have been working as a freelance model maker for over 25 years, and during that time I’ve worked for product, advertising, architectural, TV, and film companies. As fun as it is to make prototypes for e.g. the new ‘Motorola’ phone, or designing and making landing gear for the ‘A Wing Fighter’ in The Rise of Skywalker, I find it infinitely more satisfying to work with people to produce sculptures and lifecasts. I find the human form fascinating as we are all the same, but yet we are also uniquely different. 

 The recent uncommissioned sculpture of Simon Cowell, was quite challenging as I didn’t gather enough information in the form of images. My usual process involves me first taking a number of photographs and measurements of the subject at a sitting. This was a change from that norm. Sculpting a famous celebrity is tricky as we all have an image of what we think they look like, but the truth of the matter is in reality it’s not usually accurate in most cases. 

 What was also challenging on this particular sculpture was that the picture of Simon’s face seems visually slimmer than the sculpture, but in actual fact the sculpture is just as slim. It’s the colour and the lighting that visually change the volume of this sculpted piece. 

This particular sculpture was challenging for the reasons mentioned above but proved to be a good learning exercise.