For those of you here for the first time, or who may not be familiar with me and my work, allow me to introduce myself. I’ve been an artist of one kind or another all my life, and loved films as well as science and wildlife.

My “art” such as it is, started as a movie makeup artist when I was 20, and I quickly gravitated toward the
“creature” side of the field, doing prosthetics, masks, and makeup effects. Occasionally the jobs were very
fulfilling, but more often than not, small budgets and disorganized schedules prevented me from creating the kind of artistic quality I believed I was capable of. However, the skills I perfected doing film makeup and creatures were exacting in their nature, the kind of skills necessary for very realistic figures.

 

So I chose to expand my artistic range by applying the ultra-realistic techniques of film prosthetic work to the scientific discipline of reconstructing prehistoric creatures from fossil records, as well as exploring a new form of wildlife art, whereby living creatures were recreated with the highest museum taxidermy quality appearance, but without having to rely upon the skin, hide, fur or other remains of a dead animal to make the figure.

 

I also chose to take the sculpting, painting and figure finishing skills and apply them to the forensic reconstruction of human ancestral figures based on known fossil hominids. That lead me to undertake the single most well known reconstruction of my career, the full scale model of Gigantopithecus. The picture of me standing by my 9 foot tall model was published just about the time the internet was becomming popular, and so it was scanned from the book and has become something of an internet icon. Part of its popularity derived from the connection to “Bigfoot”, because proponents of the existence of Bigfoot often speculated that the explanation for Bigfoot was a relic group of Gigantopithecus creatures  who had not gone extinct as is generally presumed by science. So internet people interested in Bigfoot (and the believed relationship to this prehistoric ape) quickly seized the picture of me and Giganto as an impressive illustration of a giant ape that might still be alive today.

 

I have been fascinated all my life with the subject called “cryptozoology” (the study of possible animals not yet proven to exist, but suspected to exist) and in particular, “Bigfoot”, because of my work in films and with real apes. The most famous single piece of filmed material proported to be a bigfoot is the Patterson Gimlin film taken in 1967, and in the last 40 years, there has been an ongoing and still unresolved debate about whether the female figure seen in the film is a real primate of unknown species, or an ordinary human being wearing a fur suit.

 

So it seemed reasonable that I, having spent nearly 40 years in the business of making such suits and costumes, might be able to offer some insight into this ongoing debate. My work in this regard is included here, along with my film and scientific artwork. Regardless of your interest, dinosaurs, human origins studies, movies and makeup techniques, the Bigfoot debate, or wildlife art that pushes the envelope in terms of technique and realism, I think you’ll find something here to intrigue you.

 

                                                                                                                            Bill Munns