At some point, while working on this chapter, I remembered “Oh, wait, I built Lydia in this superhero outfit. And she’s in the other room. Wonder how she’s doing?…”

Sometimes she turns on the light for us!

Superhero Lydia currently lives in our den/family room/let’s-watch-tv-or-play-video-games room, located under the autographed photo of Jerry “The King” Lawler. (He was a few booths down from us at C2E2, a very nice fellow!) I sculpted Lydia as my final project for my grad-level Maquette Design class in college. Earlier in the course, I sculpted Fizzlebit and had some high-quality photos taken of him with the help of my professor. Unfortunately, the photos I had for Superhero Lydia were placed on a flash drive that never seemed to make it to my computer, and has since disappeared.

She’s about 18 inches tall without the bunny ears, and almost 2 feet with them. I probably used a couple of 1-pound boxes-worth of sculpy. Sculpey usually suffers a degree of cracking over time, but it can be patched. I had multiple boxes of sculpey I was juggling. Unknown to me at the time, one of those boxes was a bad batch, and as a result the areas I used it are now a paler color The same box was used to patch up Fizzlebit, and the bad sculpy spots have gradually gotten worse. His feet that I built up after taking the professional photos to be more pudgy have also gained severe cracking, which defeats (feets! Ha!) the purpose I had building them up more at the time. I had intentions of trying to cast Fizzlebit, but now it does not look like it would turn out quite so smoothly.

Patchwork gone pale.

Seriously, she kept growing.

Lydia and Fizzlebit were meant to be in ratio to each other however…Lydia ended up a little taller than she was supposed to compared to Fizzlebit. Actually, looking at them now, she’s way too tall. Both of them had to travel 600+ miles away from Savannah, Georgia after I finished college, so I’m surprised they’re in any sort of good shape.

But wait, where’s Lydia’s cape? Sculpting a cape that big did not work out too well for me. Specifically, I was building Lydia in parts, and the cape was one of them. The sculpy cracked far too much after I baked the cape. So she ended up with an alternate costume with a scarf instead, made from the tied-portion of the cape that I had built onto Lydia’s shoulders separate from the rest of the cape. Comic-wise, she does not have the actual fanny-pack, so it’s a fair trade.

There’s a small playset of Lydia and Fizzlebit I sculpted for a separate assignment that has a lot of contrast to these two large sculpts. Mostly that they were much easier to wrap up in to one small box and move outta town with, although I have yet to check and see if the bad batch of sculpy was used with the playset as well….