The Last Dance

The inspiration (I think) for this display.

This is sort of a goof I threw together one morning. I found this resin figurine in a thrift store and spent a whopping $3.95 for it though it originally cost $9.95 based on the label stuck to the bottom. These things are usually seen in a grandmother's curio cabinet collecting dust next to the equally dusty Hummels and crystal animals. I bought it for another project that I have since forgotten about and, during an infrequent straightening out of my work area, it was close to being tossed when I came up with the idea before you.

Simply put, “The Last Dance” will be Death for all of us and substituting a skull for the figurine's Marie Antoinette type of head seemed a not so clever way of mine to illustrate the event. I think I may have gotten the idea from an optical illusion painting by C. Allan Gilbert called “All Is Vanity” of a woman seated before a mirror, brushing her hair. If you pull back a bit, the scene morphs into a skull (see photo at right). SOLD!

                          Before                                           After              Preparation for this scene couldn't have been easier. I cut off the figurine's head with a hobby saw and substituted it with a scale skull that I ran off on my 3D printer.

After attaching the skull to the figurine's neck with AC glue, I gave it an application of vanilla white craft paint. Once this dried, I applied a medium gray wash to bring out the skull's features. I left the rest of the figurine as it was originally.

I was going to elaborate the scene with a ballroom but decided that the effort would be well beyond the final effect so I left well enough alone and went with a minimalist display. 12/10/20