Storyboard Artist Will Heff was around 11 when he became obsessed with Wallace & Gromit and Saturday Night Live’s Mr. Bill. He started sculpting what he calls “little guys” out of Model Magic clay. “[This] just opened a whole other way of making art besides pencil and paper,” he says. He drifted away from sculpting as he got older, but the pandemic drew him back, and he began experimenting, incorporating clay into his animations, creating a mixed-media feel.
A tribute to David Lynch, Blue Skies and Golden Sunshine was made the day Lynch died. Heff says the filmmaker was an important figure in his life, in terms of “trusting the idea will bring you to where it’s meant to be and the importance of listening to your subconscious and being unapologetically yourself… I just had to make something to show my love [for] this weird man.”
Heff listened to interviews with Lynch on YouTube and describes the process for making Blue Skies and Golden Sunshine as “pretty straightforward.” He wanted to use reference images, but even more, he was guided by how he remembered Lynch. “I think those bits of memory inform caricatures in a much more interesting way than just looking at a photo.” Stylistically, he decided the piece would be flat with layers building on each other to create details like the wrinkles in Lynch’s face. Then Heff dug in his junk bin to “jazz it up” with items that captured what Lynch loved, from Coca-Cola to cigarettes. As a result, he says: “The whole thing came together as a little shrine to someone whose art moved me deeply.”
See more of Heff’s work at willheff.com.
