Terry Carrigan looks for a spot to place a control box into a box that will be part of an interactive game while working in his remote shop in the hills between Monroe and Sultan.
MONROE — You know you’ve arrived at Skywater Studios when you round a corner on the unpaved, unsigned road and spot Bigfoot.
The 10-foot, 1,500-pound sasquatch sculpture is impossible to miss, a massive sentinel guarding the studio doors.
“I always wanted to do a Bigfoot statue,” Skywater founder Terry Carrigan said.
The towering figure was too scary for its commissioning client. A pot shop almost bought it but backed out at the last minute.
So here it stands, an apt embodiment of the Skywater motto: “Custom fabrication of unique and unusual things.”
Need a giant guitar? An animated billboard? Faux rockwork? An interactive exhibit?
Skywater can do all that and more.
“I’m the person people call when they don’t know who to call to get something done,” Carrigan said.
From his 800-square-foot studio, Carrigan produces outsize creations: a 10-foot-tall ketchup bottle, a children’s stage show set, an animated six-foot bat.
“We can design and fabricate almost anything you can think up,” his website boasts.
“We” means Carrigan, an Ohio native inspired by a boyhood viewing of “Planet of the Apes.”
He moved to California hoping to break into Hollywood special effects but got hired instead by the Knott’s Berry Farm theme park. He then started a company called Technicreations, which was one of the first vendors to design Christmas displays for Disneyland’s Small World and Haunted Mansion features.
After shuttering that business Carrigan worked as a general contractor for more than a decade.
He and his wife moved here to work for the same company, but he began missing his former vocation.
“I just like creating stuff,” Carrigan said. “Every project’s unique; no two things are the same.”
He worked briefly for Dillon Works Inc. in Mukilteo before opening Skywater three years ago.
The studio began as an exact-size replica of an escape room he was designing and has grown to encompass the adjacent carport. It houses Carrigan’s trio of 3D printers, a woodshop, sculpting supplies, and an industrial oven for baking, say, a foam latex mask.
In one section is a wood contraption with large buttons, an escape room game he is building in which the buttons must be pushed in the correct order to solve a puzzle.
In another sits the mold for the huge ketchup bottle, which looks like a well-insulated home water heater.
Here is a model of an animated six-foot octopus tentacle. There is a 3D mold for a giant sea turtle. Over here is a fog machine – one of more than 30 escape room props.
Behind the studio lies a pond ringed by boulders Carrigan sculpted using foam and concrete.
“I want to move toward concrete sculpting,” he said. “It’s easier and faster.”
Carrigan is building a new 6,000-square-foot studio further down the driveway of his five-acre spread. He aims to move in by the end of next year.
In the meantime he has a handful of projects to keep him busy, including a 56,000- square-foot Santa’s Village for a Utah client.
“Santa’s Village is going inside another building,” he said. “We won’t be building it on site” at his place. “We’ll need to rent a large space.”
Carrigan hires workers as needed. Wife Julie Bach, a former design drafter, helps out, but he has no full-time employees.
“I don’t really want to grow that big,” he said. “The less employees we have the happier I am. We’re small but mighty.”
