It started with a Styrofoam sphere – in two halves. It took a rarely found tool of a nerdy geographer to realize the map of this particular Ghost world in 3D. I distorted the usual world dimension of a 2D map a bit here and there, because some continents still escape the attention of the clergy. Asia and Africa had to be shrunk. On the other hand, some continents and countries don’t seem to have enough Sundays to hold their black masses. That’s why I had to enlarge Europe and North America. So, nothing a good Photoshop job couldn’t do. With a slightly altered map of the good old Earth into a ghostly tour-world, I fed my geographer tool. The 2D map was converted into the 3D orange slices (remember geography class?) that are needed to build a 3D sphere. It took me three days to twist, convert, and finally print the slices.

Paper the World

I was probably the only kid in my school who enjoyed papering the walls when mommy felt like making a change and daddy had to do it. So gluing the map cutouts onto the globe was a warm reminder of early childhood activities. It took me two tries to get the paper firmly sticking to the Styrofoam, but after it was sealed with Mod Podge, it really felt like a skin. I roughly painted on the flames of the continents – so that later the tiny gaps between the rhinestones matched the colors of the stones.

Glitz and Mirrors

Speaking of stones, there are 13,000 red rhinestones 2mm in diameter and 10,000 in two different yellowish colors 3mm in diameter glued on, one stone at a time, so to speak: handpicked. I tried using a rubber pen, which barely worked and lost the stones before they were put to the surface, but somehow I managed to glue them all on. All in all, it took me 61 hours. I set the armor on very late in the process, after all the figures were done, in January 2020.

The mirrored ocean was applied right after gluing rhinestones and figure pins. I started with glass mirrors, but got to limits when I touched the first coastline, which was not a straight line. Believe it or not, I bought a glass cutter and did the best I could…. mainly to cut myself with splinters from the tiles. In the early weeks of this project, I had planned to use polystyrene mirrors – they look like glass, but are lighter and can be cut with scissors. When I finally went to buy them, the supplier was out of stock and said he would never have them back in stock. In December, when I finally wanted to work with the mirrors, I frantically googled for alternatives for the glass and for once got lucky. I got my poly mirrors and mainly filled the shorelines with them. I still had blisters from the scissors. But all in all, I only spent 48 hours laying about 3000 tiles.

Clad in its shiny armor the Ghost Gig Globe’s halves were assembled in a dramatic act – ropes included! – on Jan 23 2020, more than one year after I had started the project.