EtsyMetal Book Club - The Passage by Justin Cronin

I love to read, though I've never been in a book club until we started the EtsyMetal book club. The idea was to read the book and make a piece inspired by the book. A couple books I've ready and just didn't feel inspired. And I missed a couple of books, as... they didn't sound very interesting. The most recent book sounded great and I found very inspiring.

It was The Passage by Justin Cronin.

I thought it was well written and moved along pretty quickly, especially for a complicated story line/character list.

It is really interesting as an artist to be inspired by written text - and particularly transforming it in to a 3-dimensional, metal piece. There were lots of ideas I had that could have translated well in to drawings or paintings. One in particular jumped out at me in terms of a metal piece. The teeth. This paragraph in particular really stuck with me:

For instance: Subject Zero glowed. In the infrared any heat source would do that. But the image of Subject Zero flared on the screen like a lit match, almost too bright to look at. Even his crap glowed. His hairless body, smooth and shiny as glass, looked coiled - that was the word Grey thought of, like the skin was stretched over lengths of coiled rope - and his eyes were the orange of highway cones. But the teeth were the worse. Every once in a while Grey would hear a little tinkling sound on the audio, and know it was the sound of one more tooth dropped from Zero's mouth to the cement. They rained down at the rate of half a dozen a day. These went into the incinerator, like everything else; it was one of Grey's jobs to sweep them up and it gave him the shivers to see them, long as little swords' you'd get in a fancy drink. Just the thing if, say, you wanted to unzip a rabbit and empty it out in two seconds flat.

The creatures were horrifying enough, but to imagine finding their teeth lying around everywhere, scary. I did take a bit of artistic license in creating what I would imagine their teeth to have looked like - not quite little swords... When I was playing around in the waxes - the longer pointer teeth didn't look as good, so I scaled them down and widened them out. I imagined the look of the teeth as they glinted in the light while coming out of the darkness. So I wanted them dark, but shiny, and utterly creepy. Oh... and the skull actually is not real - but amazingly realistic "movie quality" prop. I was fortunate enough to find one w/o most of it's teeth - perfect for what I wanted - making scary dentures.

It was a really fun project to work on - an art piece w/ no intention other than to create it.

I thought about making a necklace out of teeth - the way a hunter would string the teeth of their kills. I might at some point, but taking time away from making wedding rings was limited. So at some point, I might string them up to make an actual jewelry pieces. Or string each tooth individually as little pendants...

The etsymetal post will be up tomorrow on the blog, I think with the other members' pieces. Make sure to check it out - and read the book if you like post-apocalytic type stories.