Closeup of Hugo Base

After MidAmeriCon II I didn’t think I would be working on a Hugo base anytime soon.  But right after the convention a month later I was Fan Guest of Honor at Fencon in Texas.  And like one does I was taking a break in the bar talking to Vincent Villafranca and some other friends.  Elizabeth  McCarty mentioned she wanted a sculpture to put on my Hugo base and that started Vincent and I down the path of collaborating on the base.

As Vincent and I were both from California, we thought it would be fitting to work on a base for Worldcon 76 in San Jose.  So we threw around some ideas of concepts and settled using the Lick Observatory as inspiration for the base.

Early in designing

Vincent came to Austin and we spent an afternoon creating figures for the base.  We thought creating robots looking into telescopes around the observatory would be interesting and so we sat down and started sculpting.  Once we had a few figures created we talked about layout and a general idea of where the figures will fit on the base.

The telescopes were beads that I had that I used as hats for my other robots.

Day of sculpting

Once we were done Vincent left me some clay to create more figures and once I was done I mailed him my robots to create molds and figure out the final layout on the base.

After the molding was done, Vincent sent me some shots of the base and we agreed on the layout of all the figures on the base itself.

He then had the hard part of making the molds and creating the bronzes.

And I may be biased but I think they are pretty amazing.

Image created for Hugo base video