Date Added: 18 April 2007
This is a wonderful fantasy scene of Neptune and a Mermaid playing a dominos on the bottom of the sea. Neptune, with his long golden hair and long full beard, is seated on a shell on one side of a game table holding his trident in his hand and ready to move a piece with his other. The Mermaid is seated on a shell on the other side of the game table with her detailed green and gold tinted fish tail body extending out. She has long auburn colored hair and is wearing a decorative headdress with a shell in the center of the headband. She is also wearing a necklace with a silver starfish dangling from the center. The diorama is full of underwater life including coral rocks, conch shells, starfish, a shark, a seahorse, and more. According the Artist, Noble Johnson, "this project came about more as an act of commitment to see it through rather than innate skill or advanced modeling techniques." The scene and idea came from a plan from Jack Needham's book. According to Noble, "I'd lie awake at night trying how to figure out how to get the seats oriented correctly, how get the bodies together and seated correctly, how to make the hair and beard so I could get the heads onto the torsos once the parts were inside the bottle, etc. I also collected pictures of fish, shells, crabs, coral, sea horses, mermaids, etc. to use as patterns. The carving and painting of the pieces took about 100 hours and it took another 150 hours to get it in the bottle and permanently sitting the right way. Most of the tools I used, excepting for razor saws, Xacto knives, etc. were made using the designs in Don Hubbard's book or as posted on John Fox's web site. This project was a gift to a special friend of mine who recently lost her 21-year old son to cancer." The bottle is sealed with a polished wooden stopper and leather, decoratively weaved covering the neck.
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