From Workshop
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It all started one night at a benefit event in Rhode Island. A couple of us got talking about how cool it would be to build a full sized Jabba the Hutt puppet for use at parades and other events. One thing led to another, and next thing you know we were sitting on a porch with a bunch of foam and hot glue!
The goal of the project was simple: make a highly accurate, fully movable, light weight, inexpensive Jabba puppet in under a month.
Simple, right?
He started off humble... black plastic irrigation tubes bent to a ship's hull type frame, and wrapped in foam purchased at Building 19.
Next we took a couple of sheets of foam and tossed them into place. One for the tail, the other for the head. Starting with the head, we trimmed, shaped and hot glued it until it started to look Jabba like.
From there we trimmed the lower part of the head/torso and shaped Jabba's first major flab-roll.
One big slash with the razor and Jabba had a mouth!
Bib Fortuna spent the evening that night doing some of the fine details of the face...
Before long, Jabba had a tail and some pretty well defined features on his head. This photo, while the perspective is somewhat exaggerated, gives you a sense of scale. He's one big slug!
Next came the initial skinning! We used a fabric called "Jet Set" at Joann Fabrics. It's basically a spandex type thing that has no particular sheen to it. We sprayed Jabba with 3M 77 spray adhesive, then placed the fabric down on the foam. The glue holds it REALLY well! We bunched it up along the tail and belly to make some nice ripples of hutt-flesh.
Of particular note are the suckers on Jabba's tail... rings of foam glued on before the fabric, leaving a pretty realistic looking lower tail surface!
The other arm was built, and the skin was applied to the rest of the body similarly to how it was put down on the tail. Just less folds on the face.
When time for painting came along, we went to home depot to pick up a gallon of a base coat. We went with a yellow similar to that of the Sideshow Collectibles Jabba, as we thought that was an awesome model overall. The paint was thinned down and sprayed through a pesticide sprayer. Not ideal, but we were short a fitting for the air compressor, so the good sprayer wasn't going to work.
Here he is with all of the base yellow and some of the green added on. Now he's starting to look like a Hutt!
Next up was adding in the eyes. They are painted on the inside of a clear plastic bowl. This gives them a nice shiny look, and ensures that the paint won't easily scratch off.
[[File: JabbaOldEyes.jpg]]
But wait... something isn't right! Jabba looks so... sad! Turns out that we did a couple of things wrong. Check out this comparison to the Sideshow Jabba:
First off, the eyes are way too slanted. He had droopy sad puppy eyes. Next up is that the eyes are too expressive in general. His eyes should be pretty dark and reptilian.
The slant was fixed easily by manipulating the folds of fabric around the eyes. Take one corner up a bit and let the other out. Next thing you know, the eyes are straight. These eyes were a total re-make from a new cheap plastic bowl.
MUCH more evil!
After the eyes, the next thing was more painting. We added a lot of dark green to the sides, back and tail, and toned down the yellow with some browns and beiges. The underside of the tail got a lot more brown than the rest. We are trying for an average of all the incarnations of Jabba - RotJ, the prequels, the toys, etc...
And then it was done!!
