Take a look at ‘preparing boby’, netamir’s cool photo set at Flickr, which records the making of her first puppet from wire, paper mache, foam and fabric. I love his expressions, how involved and helpful he is with making himself, and his shape!
As I’ve commented before, I really find the look of this unfinished stage of making very attractive. Thank you for letting me use one of your images, neta :-).
I’ve been busy making two of those poseable wooden manikins that artists use to draw from into small puppet versions of two actors, a man and a woman. Its been fiddly, since to make the proportions right, I had change the shapes of the bodies, and the length of the limbs, which in turn means undoing the joints and shortening some of the springs that tension them . Really, the manikins are quite odd around the hips. I read that these deluxe guys have a lot more movement than the wooden ones, but they just make me laugh! And the woman is frightening!
Its a strange range of other poseable figures you can get supposedly to draw from. Horses, dinosaurs and giraffes are carried by our local art store. I know people buy them just because they are cool, but I like to imagine instead that there is a thriving subculture of ‘giraffe artists’ for instance.
I’m not participating in the Month of Softies this time. Partly I’ve been short on time, but I also wasn’t inspired. And while I think moving it to Flickr was more than understandable, I find that I feel differently about it over there. I’m not sure why.
Manufacturing a Yellow Hound is a short online film showing the process of making this cool plaster dog sculpture. The armature is bundles of foil squished into shape and joined with masking tape. The shape is then covered with plaster bandage and painted. This elephant and bee are made the same way.
I found the yellow hound at Naive Knitting where the maker, Martha Wasacz, explains how the dog came about and fitted in with her thoughts about an open source policy towards crafting. I think that’s how it works, too.
Update 2015: broken links
This is my submission for Loobylu’s July’s Month of Softies, a sock monkey. I’ve been curious about sock monkeys since first reading about the tradition a year or two ago, so I’m glad to have tried it out. This one started out plain and ugly, and I nearly abandoned him altogether, but I kept going back and reshaping bits. Now he is more refined, and I have grown quite fond of him.
Here are a few more pictures of him:
Happened across Duct Tape Rachel, a bold photo of the process of making a self-form-fitting duct tape dressmaker’s dummy. It links to an article called Clone yourself a Fitting Assistant by , which in turn shows you four ways of making your own dummy:
My husband’s grandfather had a wide notion of what might be fixed with paint, and it got more extensive as he got older, until he was happily fixing stains in upholstery and carpets with dabs of paint. I’ve been thinking about him today, because I have been spraypainting a border pattern onto a large piece of carpet which is to be used in a play. The design was cut as a stencil:
Dave Riley is a mask-maker, puppeteer and playwright based in Brisbane. His Mask Studio tutorials have been of great help to me a number of times – thanks Dave! There are two mask tutorials:
The felt method is really interesting. It involves soaking the felt in white glue and then moulding it to shape rather like working leather. There are then different finishes to experiment with, including paint, and leather gloss and polish. The result is a very light strong mask.
A few years ago when I first tried it and made a series of animal masks, I built on a paper mache base because I wasn’t sure it would be strong enough otherwise, but recently in making some smaller masks for Hidden Corners’ ‘See Beneath’, I was more confident in using the felt by itself, with a muslin/white glue backing to make the inside comfortable and strong.
The seaweed fronds had a little extra strengthening, just because the shape was not intrinsically strong like the shell. The fishy mask was done a little differently, without felt because I wanted finer detail. It is carved quite thinly out of styrofoam, and has several layers of muslin and white glue to give it strength.
These have a water-based polymer gloss varnish added to the paint, which kind of plasticizes them.
You know you are either going loopy, or your new creation has charm, or possibly both, when you find yourself taking it from room to room with you around the house, or with you in the car while driving errands. Especially when its a computer bug. And we won’t mention talking to it.
There are a few other images below. This bug was made for loobylu’s June Month of Softies. My thanks once again, Claire.
