{"id":337,"date":"2007-05-01T23:14:07","date_gmt":"2007-05-01T23:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/?p=337"},"modified":"2008-01-03T11:21:03","modified_gmt":"2008-01-03T01:21:03","slug":"flying-ducks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/2007\/05\/01\/flying-ducks\/","title":{"rendered":"Flying ducks"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m working on several projects at once at the moment. One is making a set of those flying ducks<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\"Flying<\/a><\/p>\n

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

\"Flying<\/a><\/p>\n

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,<\/p>\n

\"Flying<\/a><\/p>\n

and the oven:<\/p>\n

\"Ducks<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[184,20,107,92,191,29],"tags":[702,183,704,1371,703,217,1383,1389,1375,1373],"class_list":["post-337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-craft","category-make","category-materials","category-portfolio","category-props","category-tutorial","tag-flying-ducks","tag-how-to","tag-indian-runner-ducks","tag-make","tag-paper-pulp","tag-polystyrene","tag-portfolio","tag-props","tag-theatre","tag-tutorial"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paZhI-5r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritsdancing.com\/sdblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}