make

A strange girl

My friend Lynda would like to know seven strange things about me… Thanks, Lynda.

  • I disliked dolls as a child, but loved teddy bears and other animal toys. My favourite was a panda I was given when I was about 4. I was fluent in Panda talk. Another favourite was a little German-made bear that I was given to keep in my pocket on the plane when my family moved from South Africa to Australia when I was seven. (I don’t think he is a Stieff bear, because I don’t remember him ever having a stud in his ear, but he is a dead-ringer for Peter Bull’s bear, Theodore, that sold for a fortune in 1995.)
    Edward Bear
  • When I was little I used to save up my pocket money for 10 weeks to buy little felt mice from a tiny shop called The Acorn in the Adelaide Hills. They had tartan clothing, and you could get girl and boy mice. Later I started to make them for myself, and I had a whole family of them, all with alliterative names like Miranda Mouse. I also made them things like tiny books, bags and babies. I still have some, and I still make them occasionally. There are notes on the photo if you follow its link through to Flickr.
    Felt mice

  • When I was about 12 I went through a phase of carving rabbits in the ends of matchsticks.
  • Another early foray in craft was making miniature gonks in football colours for friends at school. Gonks were a 60’s fad, essentially humpty dumpties with big hands and feet, and a fuzzy tuft of hair.
    Gonks

  • At about the same age I started making soft toys from patterns in women’s magazines, only I often made them straight from the miniature pattern on the page, rather than scaling them up
  • We have a couple of treasured crocheted blankets made by grannies in the family, but on the whole I dislike crocheted objects. Amigurumi drive me nuts. I don’t know why.
  • I find it very difficult to tag people; not sure why. (I also have a telephone thing, have to push myself to telephone at times). So if any of my blogging friends would like to take up the meme and run with it, please do, and let me know in comments here.

Dragon

Dragonz

Dragon is a beautiful animation ad made for United Airlines. It’s made using paper cut-out stop-motion puppets, and you can see the process and team, lead by director, Jamie Caliri, in The Making of Dragon. Caliri also directed the ending animation for Lemony Snicket.

(via Lines and Colours)

Cockroaches

Cockroach

(photo credit: Ella Misso)

This very cool cockroach puppet, made by my friend Ella Misso, looks as if it could come straight out of some Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers trip! Incidentally, here is a pilot of a proposed clay-animation film adaptation of the Freak Brothers.

John Cox: How to make a monster

Gillmanx

John Cox‘s exhibition How to Make a Monster has been travelling around Australia for some time now, and at present it’s at the Scienceworks Museum in Melbourne until mid July. John’s work became known with his making of the animal cast in Babe, but he has since been involved in many movies, including Crocodile Dundee in LA, George of the Jungle 2, Peter Pan, and Inspector Gadget 2. Often exhibitions only hint at how things are made, but How to Make a Monster looks as if it goes into the making process in detail. I feel there is often a hunger for this kind of information, perhaps especially among children. The willingness to share such detail both here and on his website is a generosity I respect and appreciate.

How to make a monster: the art and technology of animatronics is a great review, talking through many of the facets of the exhibition, while Ghoul School ‘explores the workshop of Australia’s pre-eminent monster-maker’.

I’m interested Cox uses computer technology linked with a router for some sculpting.

The 9-metre crocodile made for Peter Pan is amazing. Check out the video studio for footage of the crocodile being tested…

Jcox

It took 4 months to make and is a favourite of Cox’s, and of the puppeteer, Richard Mueck:

‘RICHARDMUECK (SCULPTOR/PUPPETEER): This was an absolute joy to perform. This was possibly the most powerful, impressive puppet I’ve ever had my hands on, and I was like a little kid in a toy shop who just got the coolest Christmas present. — ABC 7.30 Report

Unfortunately, due to financial pressures, the director had to cut its use to a cameo role: “You see it open one eye and move its head about 30 centimetres,” Cox says. “We could have done that with a head on a stick.”

Experience has taught him not to be too precious about his creations. Making them is the real buzz; what happens after that is often beyond his control. “We got to build this amazing, big thing and it worked,” he says. “It makes for an interesting story and there are no bad feelings.” – SMH

This rings absolutely true. As do Cox’s practical hints for students.

Msg: have snake

IMG_3832-1

Whipped up yesterday from materials at hand, as a surprise for my eldest’s jungle party.

All the wild little horses

Horse sculptures

I loved making these two little horses recently for an up-coming theatre production, Emma’s Dynasty, by Jigsaw Theatre Company. They are based on an earthenware Chinese Han Dynasty horse that is here in the Australian National Gallery collection, but they are tiny in comparison, only 17 cm high at the head. I really like how stocky and wild the horse is, and how he looks like he has come to a screaming halt.

Horse

A while ago Andrew at PuppetVision linked to a super sculpey sculpting tutorial by Peter Konig, and it was really useful to me while I was doing the horses – thanks to you both! The tutorial is much more detailed than what I am going to write here – no sense repeating – and I can really recommend it.

The first steps were to make an armature using armature wire. In this case the strength the armature gives the legs and tail is particularly important. From the nose to the tail is one wire, and then the legs are separate wires, wired on with fine wire (Peter has close-ups on how to attach them), and set in place with Knead-It, a Selley’s two-part epoxy. You knead the parts together, and it sets as hard as a rock in five minutes – invaluable stuff!

Horse sculpture

I also used wire and Knead-It to attach the armature to a firm stand. I struggle with being too impatient at the beginning of a project to go to the trouble of making a firm base like this, and I often regret it – and know I’m going to regret it, what’s more! However, I’m getting wiser about this, and decided to follow Peter’s advice, even though the horse was small.

Horse sculpture

Another tip that I appreciated was to make a cardboard cutout of the silhouette of the horse to use as a reference while sculpting. I usually sculpt by eye, but this allows you to check how you are going.

Horse sculpture

I padded out some of the bulkier parts of the body with aluminium foil, as a way of saving how much super sculpey I needed to use later. Wire is wound around the armature wires to give something for the modeling clay to grip onto.

Horse sculpture

Now the best bit, the modeling! I’ve only recently started using Super Sculpey, and its a real pleasure to work with, because it remains soft for a long time and takes detail so well. Peter says to check it’s soft when you buy it, in case its been on the shelf a long time, and to keep it in a zip lock plastic bag.

Horse sculpture

So she kneaded it and punched it and pounded and pulled till it looked okay… You can use mineral turpentine to gently bush the surface detail to smooth it, and almost model the tiny detail with the brush.

Horse sculpture

Into the oven to bake. I had trouble fitting it in my oven still attached to the stand, and ended up putting it in on its side. I thought trying to cut off the support before the horse was baked might risk the horse getting squashed. Maybe next time I should make it so it unscrews instead.

Horse sculpture

Sawing the support bolt off was a little tricky, but manageable. There were a few small cracks, but I gather this is quite common, and took Peter’s advice to fill them with sculpey and blast it for a few seconds with a heat gun, only in my case it was with a hair dryer. Instant glue is effective for mending breaks. Then, on to the second horse.

Horse sculpture

Super sculpey takes acrylic paint very well, and I used a dappled mix of greys and terracottas to get the final finish.

Horse sculptures

There are more photos here. I guess I got a bit carried away, but sometimes that just happens.

Horse sculptures

Flying ducks again

Painting

The ducks have progressed to the painting stage, and I should finish them today. When the paper mache dried fully, it somehow warped the necks and top wings slightly, so that the ducks didn’t sit flat against the wall, so I had to do a bit of surgery, making a cut in each tension point, and filling it to push the part back. I also spent quite a lot of time smoothing the surface and sanding and filing the feather shapes, as the paper mache doesn’t allow fine shaping, and dries just a little bumpy. It’s also proving tricky to get the glazed translucent look that the ceramic ducks have. I am putting a lot of hope in the final varnish!

Update:

This is how they turned out. They are for “1 in A 100”, a play about mental illness (synopsis here) written by Mary Rachel Brown, directed by Carol Woodrow, design by Imogen Keen, at Canberra’s Street Theatre in May 2007.

IMG_3780-1

Flying ducks

I’m working on several projects at once at the moment. One is making a set of those flying ducks that people had as wall ornaments when I was growing up. I’ve been lent a couple to model from, and looking at them up close I can understand their attraction, despite their kitsch reputation. Since the ones I am making are theatre props they only have to look like the real thing. Inside, they have an mdf structure, and I have bulked them out with polystyrene. I like carving styrene, except for the mess.

Flying ducks

The next part of the process is covering the shapes with a commercial paper mache pulp. It starts as a dry mix, and when you add it to water it turns into a thick paste, which can be smoothed on and sticks to most surfaces. Here I’m half way through adding the paper mache to the big duck:

Flying ducks

The pulp takes a couple of days to dry, but I’m always impatient with things like this, and I have been hurrying it along by putting the ducks in the sun,

Flying ducks

and the oven:

Ducks in the oven

I’ll have to add more detail to the shapes, like the eyes, tails and feather patterns, and then its a matter of getting the surface smooth and painting it to look like china.

We have four beautiful white pet Indian Runner ducks, and it was funny to see them charging across the back garden in a line just as I was photograhing these in the kitchen.

The Tale of How

How

The Tale of How is a beautiful and intreguing animation, a labour of love by three friends calling themselves the Blackheart Gang, who hail from Cape Town, South Africa. It’s the second part of a larger story they envisage, A Dodo Trilogy. Their ‘making of’ video introduces the makers and explains how they went about it.

(via She Dreams in Digital)

Update: Siouxfire has a cool Concise Overview of “The Household”, a series of interviews, production
images, and information on the two follow-ups completing the Dodo
trilogy as well as the following trilogy (the Bear Histories) at Siouxwire. Thanks, Siouxfire!