Grammy Zombie Part 2

Sorry for the delay, lets get back to it! So, Grammy has her head, but that's all. That's not cool. Poor Grammy Zombie. Lets's hook her up with some body.

I took some waxed card stock that Sarah got from her work, it was a shipping thing. Cool tough card, but not the best for finished art. Anyway, I rolled the card into 'bones' and taped it into tight little tubes, using my own limbs as a rough guide. The pointy thing there is going to be Grammy's pelvis.

Next, using galvanized fencing wire, I strung her body together. I used long lengths of wire, twined around the 'bones' to connect them all, and threw more tape around all that, to help keep her in shape and together. I also added a 'ribcage' of just bend sheets of the paper, so that her chest stays hollow but has some definition. I'll be adding 'skin' to her later.

Lastly, I did a little more work on her head. I made eyes from glass pebbles, back painting them...then glued them in with hot glue. Her 'skin' is paper towels soaked in modpodge and water as a pseudo papier mache. It gives her nice wrinkly skin.

Next time, we'll attach the head and maybe skin the body a little more. Heck, may even get to hands and/or dressing her!

Grammy Zombie Part 1

Alright, let's start on Grammy's head!

Grammy's head starts as a styrene skull that I bought last Halloween. Skulls are ALWAYS good bases for heads.

I took a pocket knife and cut her jaw away from the rest of her skull. Fortunately, the skull I bought seems to have been a multipart construct, so removing the jaw was REALLY simple.  I trimmed the back of the teeth some to make them a more realistic thickness.

The jaw is roughly wired/taped back into place, but hanging open. I like zombies to have their mouths open, because, you know, they are always hungry for brains or flesh.

I stabbed some bailing wire into her skull from the bottom to make a neck, then taped some card stock around it to flesh out a neck. The card is leftover packing dividers from my girlfriend's work. They're wax coated and not amazingly useful for art, but have been REALLY useful for construction material in projects like this, or for stencils and the like. Grammy Zombie is very inexpensive at this stage, and she won't get much more costly, I promise!

Now, I took some brown packing paper (The brown paper some companies wad up to cushion packages, instead of using packing peanuts) that I saved from packages I'd gotten (Yeah, I'm that cheap), and I glued it onto my skull and 'neck' with mod-podge. What we are doing here is half decopage and half papier mache.

More to come next time. More head stuff and starting the body!

(If you are actually trying to follow along with this, I'm sorry in advance. I don't know if this will be a 'tutorial' at all. I'm just talking through what I am doing.) Next part will be the body. It needs more bailing wire, more card stock/paper, more brown paper and more tape (duct and masking).

ZOMBIES!

Halloween is my favorite holiday, and that means I spend more time getting ready for it than I do other holidays. This year I'm adding zombies to my spooky yard.

As you can see, my yard last year was spider infested. I don't think that the spiders will be going away, but Zombies will be making an appearance.

Cara, the mummified corpse victim of the spiders is being upgraded to a zombie. She's getting a new(ish) paint job, some wiring to help her stand, and new hands.

We've got two new fellas joining Cara. There's Crawley and Walker. Crawley is half formed, and Walker is a fully formed zombie.

Crawley is complete at this point asside from accessories. I need to mess up his shirt, and maybe add an earring or something.

Walker needs his hands finished, he needs feets, and clothing needs to be aged and ratted up.

Think I may be adding a grammy zombie too...and IF I do, I'll be doing a walk through on how I build her. Until then, enjoy the zombies!

Warning: Personal Crap to Follow

I quit 'vaping' (smoking the e-cigarette), and have been nicotine/habit free for about a month now!

We've gotten a Keurig coffee machine and it is awesome. Coffee's taking the place of my cigarette habit. Good thing that studies show that coffee adds to longevity.

We did lose Mom, and my life's been kind of upside down for all that. I'm getting by, but it's a huge huge change. I always knew it would be just an earth-shattering change, but until it happened, I had no idea how it would feel.