Gnome Sayin'?

My friend Kay handed me a yard gnome and told me to go to work on it. He was a regular old yard gnome, dirty from being outside, with inset eyes and a gaping hole in his left foot due to something having broken off, possibly a shovel. (Ask me if I took a before photo. Go ahead, ask.) I stared and stared at this thing for months, trying to decide what to do with it. Then one day Kay's husband said "He needs a blood-soaked beard." That's when it occurred to me that this gnome was a raving psychopath.

I immediately popped his eyes out, grabbed my trusty can of Krylon black spray primer, and coated the little bastard. I decided the best approach was to go ahead and repaint him with commonly accepted "gnome colors," you know what I mean, and then cover the clothes with mud and gore as if he's been psychopathing really hard all day.

But now he had two gaping holes where his old "normal" eyes had been! Enter Tohickon Glass Eyes, a taxidermy company with the most cooperative search and order feature I have found yet. I chose 8mm eyes, dropped them in, and glued with E-6000. (There's no post or anything on the back of the eyes to hold them in, but the E-6000 should be fine.)

Here he is in all his psycho glory:


Oh and before I attached the eyes I coated him with two coats of poly varnish. Here's another view:


Let's talk about the shovel:


I needed to put something in the gaping hole to help him stand up, as the broken shovel or whatever was clearly load-bearing. I decided a brutally sharp metal shovel would be in order, so I went to the Salvation Army store and found a butt-ugly cheese slicer with a resin picnic basket attached to the handle (grapes and baguettes and everything - just really fucking hideous) which I smashed off to get to the metal slicer part. (Turns out I could have just worked around it, but whatever. I did the world a favor.) I used my Dremel to shape it into a shovel and file down the edges so it wouldn't kill anyone (at least not accidentally...) and then I stuffed the hole in the foot with black Crayola Model Magic air-dry clay and stuck the shovel into that. I really wasn't sure this plan would work, but it went pretty well:


This shot is kind of dark, but I mostly just shaped it into the sole of the shoe and the top of the shovel (which you can see better in the top photo). After it dried I painted it to match, and I think it turned out well. Also that piece sticking out of the back of the foot is some plastic covered wire, which the contractors that rebuilt our fence helpfully left lying all over our back yard, and which I used during the painting process just to prop him up. (You can see that better in the second photo from the top.) But it worked so well and stayed in so firmly that I decided to color it black with a sharpie and leave it in there. I'm not sure the air-dry clay would be sturdy enough to support him, so it's just extra precaution.

This project was a success in that I found a fantastic supplier of freaky eyes, and also because I signed up for the free WASCO taxidermy catalog which I highly recommend. HIGHLY. It's dense, too -- I'm only about halfway through it. And I'm totally using it to write my Xmas list for Santa.