Richard III

I feel as though a melted chess king is a pretty obvious idea for Richard III, long deformed in the mind of popular culture, now proven scoliotic with the 2012 exhumation of his skeleton from under a parking lot in Leicester. But for all of its – to me – screaming obviousness, I’m still incredibly pleased with this one – it works. It works whether you’ve soaked up general knowledge enough to know that R3 is supposed to have had some sort of physical asymmetry, and it works if you’ve never heard from him. It helps if you know that the chess piece shown on the front is a king, but you can probably intuit that even if you don’t know it. After my miniature glow-in-the-dark skull (no writer gets to type these words often enough) gave me the idea for this ‘canonization’ (pun intended), this was one of the first ideas I came up with. It was also the first object that I needed to modify. Rummaging around, looking for something else, I found the king one morning before work. I thought to myself that I’d first need to melt away one side with a lighter and then soften the remaining side to make it bend. So I did that and was amazed when it worked out just as anticipated. I had correctly plotted the arcane steps of a process I had never undertaken before – I could do this.