Madame Tussauds Wax Museum Visits ABC30 | ABC30 Fresno

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By ABC30

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Fresno, CA Madame Tussauds wax museum brought Barack Obama and Jennifer Lopez into the Action News studio.

The folks with Madame Tussauds said President Barack Obama is the most popular figure they have right now. The sculptors work with hundreds of pictures and sometimes they have real measurements of the people they are creating a wax figure of, so what you see in the museum is usually the same height and body shape of the celebrity.

The new and 12th Madame Tussauds Museum opens August 1st in Hollywood and there will be a little over 100 other wax figures.

Eventually they want to catch up to the 300 figures in the original museum in London. The artists that create them say it's a painstaking process.

The sculpture takes 4 to 6 weeks to sculpt the head out of clay and then make a mold of plaster and then pour the molten wax. The you make the eyes and teeth out plastic and insert them from the back and the hair is real human hair that gets punched in strand by strand with a little needle tool. Then finally the figure gets painted with oil paint because it's more translucent.

When you're up close, you can see the extraordinary detail that goes into these sculptures.