Madame Tussauds Hong Kong - Wax Figure Making Process

Wax Figure Making Process

In over one or more sittings, a highly skilled sculptor from Madame Tussauds Studios who is given direct access to the celebrity will record the colours of the hair and eyes, and over 500 precise body measurements are referenced. Most important is to capture the look of the celebrity in order to reflect the personality of each unique individual. The next task is to make a clay model of the head and body which is used to create a mould. Wax cast of the head and hands are made from the mould, and the eyes are inserted. Each eye is hand-painted to achieve a perfect match of the original. Real human hair is then inserted painstakingly strand by strand.

The head and hands are coloured using a blend of oil, water and acrylic colour. From the mould, the body is cast in fibreglass, and the head and hands are fitted to the fiberglass body and dressed in clothes that are often donated by the celebrity. The pose, clothes and expression on the face all contribute to making the figure as realistic as possible. The whole process usually takes up to six months by a team of 20 people to create and cost about HK$1 million each.

Read more about this topic:  Madame Tussauds Hong Kong

Famous quotes containing the words wax, figure, making and/or process:

    A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.
    Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)

    All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
    Roland Barthes (1915–1980)

    So, laying his cheek against the dresser’s wooden one,
    He died making up stories, the ones
    Not every child wanted to listen to.
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)

    Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.
    James Conant (1893–1978)