Discarded pen refills, parts of an old HMT watch, fur from a discarded teddy bear....all these and more went into the making of a model of Rajnikanth as Chitti in 2.0. Saikumar Saripalli made it. The IT professional based in Hyderabad, has been making models of popular movie characters for the past seven years.
“The trailer had just released and I was taken with the scene in which Rajnikanth is seen with guns all around him. I decided to make a model and it me took over a month for me to complete the project,” he says. He used M-seal to make the basic model and keychains for the guns.
This passion is an old, long-buried love for art from school days, he confesses. But it revived when he watched a model-making YouTube video and decided to try his hand at it. His first model was that of the superhero Hulk from the Marvel comics in 2011. Since then, Saikumar has made Baahubali carrying the shivalingam, Hellboy’s big baby and mask from the movie Predator.
Most of his artworks take anywhere between two weeks to a month. The artist tries to make use of things that are lying around his home instead of buying new stuff. “With every model that I make, I learn something new. I watch a lot of DIY (Do it yourself ) videos and try to learn new ways ,” he adds.
Saikumar does not sell his creations, but he does actively post them on Facebook and Twitter says that his biggest hit was the replica of a key from the Telugu movie 24 . “Thanks to this I could meet actor Surya when he was in Visakhapatnam,” he says.
