It started life as a simple sketch.
Two years of weekend work later and New York artist Jim McKenzie was putting the finishing touches on his spellbinding scarecrow sculpture.
And he shows just how he did it in a mesmerizing video that’s now going viral.
“I’ve always felt a strong connection toward scarecrows,” the director, designer and animator at Aardman Nathan Love told The Huffington Post this week.
“There’s a great blend of magic, loneliness and wonder to them,” he said. “They’re these empty sacks with painted-on emotions who have just one purpose in life ― to scare crows.”
After thinking about their function during a commute to work in 2014, McKenzie decided to flip the traditional concept of the scarecrow on its head.
He vowed to push the character in a different direction and give his interpretation a wider range of emotions than you’d usually see.
The behind-the-scenes video shows the painstaking process that McKenzie went through in using epoxy clay to transform his initial pencil drawing into the finished resin sculpture ― which, in fact, has a phobia of crows.
McKenzie exhibited the piece, alongside other works he’s developed on his weekends, at Santa Monica’s Copro Gallery last month. He now plans to develop a stop motion series around the character.
