Did you ever think about how it would be your hero cartoons if he had aged? Well, tha’s what happened to me… and here the inspiration for “I remember when…”.

A quite dated cartoon, Popeye, known in Italy as Braccio di Ferro, created by the Flaisher’s brothers and the pencil of the cartoonist Elzie Crisler Segache. The sailor made the first appeared in 1933 in a short of Betty Boop, always Fleisher’s, inventors in 1914 of rotoscoping, which created a comic book style, but highly realistic.
Here the realism, stubbornly sought in the first half of my piece, which rises in its 107 cm leaning on a base, where the search for the material detail through color and wafer papers with occlusions jelly pearls, it is to give the feeling of a mooring mast rusty iron. No one could miss the peaks and coils made of sugar paste, natural support for the central drum where the “Stars and Stripes” flag is painted with coffee and gels, accompanied by the inscription airbrushed that gives the title to the work: “I REMEMBER WHEN … I WAS YOUNG”.

Here I give the shape to the aged face of Popeye, struck by a piece of cinematic Hollywood makeup artist Rick Baker.
The search for realism here finds its culmination: the desire to give life to the character with the movement and plasticity made me lean towards the choice of the mix of “high and low relief” paste painted sugar blended with airbrush and brush with color to fuel oil, definitely my trademark. The volumes are trying to give life to the material and emphasize the face that gets in the eye the focus point of the entire pièce: an eye that becomes the center of the work but also the center of emotions, an eye that remembers his strong and energetic past, with its inevitable can of spinach, made of frosting with vegetable in wafer. Disdainful of fear and ready to defend his “beautiful” fight to the sound of “punches” with his rival in love Brutus. In high relief, the two shapes are painted with dry shades. The onomatopoeic sounds, airbrushed with handmade stencils and then cut by a plotter, characterize the memory on a white cloud of youth and strength. The inscriptions are embossed, engraved and airbrushed dithered effect, while full black border is painted in edible tempera.
She finally appears, thin and bony. Huge shoes on a meadow of daisies from which tiptoed poses with making an airhead and love. A funny and eccentric character, Olivia Oyl, androgynous measures 57 … 19-19-19, which represented a kind of timid tomboy: the extremely fine arts are realized in the pièce in dried pasta filled with frosting. He could not miss the little mascot Swee’Pea, also made of “high and low relief.”
Despite trying to imagine an aged hero in the physical, I tried to be heard
the heart still in love like the first
day. A modern couple of other times …
… BODY OF A THOUSAND WHALES!

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