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.

Finished Carousel Horse!

I finally finished the carousel horse and he's taken up residence in my bedroom! Here's a couple of pictures of him in his new home!

The horse is from a child's spring horse, the pole is a curtain rod (originally 8' but cut down to 7'4"ish.), and the um... ivy is fake.

This project spanned months of very sporadic work, but it's done, and that's what counts. There's not really much to say about him now, other than I'm very pleased with the results. I may do another at some point, but I'm not really seeing a need to.

The bedroom has been getting a lot of focus from me lately. Next post will probably be about a unicorn silhouette I did just yesterday for it.  Hope that me talkinga bout my bedroom doesn't make you too uncomfortable. Heheheh. Oh, and side note: the green monster peeping at the bottom of both pictures is my chupacabras, and yes, he lives in the bedroom too.

Working on a horse

I have a love for carousels and carousel horses, and really wanted to make one of my own for a while, now. I came across this tutorial one day and knew I HAD to try it.

Eventually I found the horse at an antiques mall for $35 (I think), and picked it up.

The pictures here, in order are:

1) The horse after I had patched the holes in it's legs and neck, 2) The horse primed white and 3) Repainted.

That's where we stand right now. I have the pole to put him/her on, and a stand for it, so we'll get to the finished product soon. Right now it is sitting in the corner of my living room, but once it's finished it'll be decor for the bedroom.

I doubt I'll have it finished this week, but expect an update post about it when I do.

On other project news, I'm working on several (TONS) of paintings, and I'm making a wooden cutout of a raccoon for my yard, so we'll have all of those to put up soon enough, too!

Until then, I've put up plenty of stuff in the etsy shop for you to see. I'll probably do a post or two about the paintings there, but for now you can go look and imagine what I'm planning on saying about them.

Another personal post

So I went with another vacation picture for this post. I wasn't sure what else to do for it. It's me feeding a 'guanaco' which is some sort of llama. I fed it at the Sevierville Deer Farm, which has a pretty cool petting zoo.

The meat of the message today on this post has nothing to do with vacation, though. I just was at a loss as to what picture to put up, and that one seemed good enough.

When I posted Friday about starting this blog back and working on it near daily, I may have spoken too soon. I'm not intending on abandoning it again, but I've got a lot more on my plate than I first thought I did.

My mom is in the hospital, she has been for some time now, and she's not doing well at all. It's really looking like we're going to lose her, and soon.

This isn't a plea for sympathy, and I'm not looking for a bunch of sympathy comments (they are nice, I just don't want anyone to feel obligated)...I really just wanted to let you know kind of where I'm at right now, so if I drop the ball on this thing, there's a reason. I'm going to try to not let that happen, though.

I'm BACK! AGAIN! Fo' Reals!

Alright, it's been too damned long since I posted. I got no excuse, other than I get bored with shouting into the vacuum, which is exactly what blogging feels like sometimes.

Anyway, I just got back from a birthday/vacation, so I thought now was a good time to get started back on this thing. The smiling puffer fish picture was one I took while there. It's from the Ripley's Aquarium in Gatlinburg, TN.

Art wise, I've been painting a lot. My Etsy shop has plenty new in it. I got a scroll saw for Christmas, so that's adding to my bag of tricks! I've finished, started, abandoned, or have halfway completed ALL sorts of weird little projects, and I'll be talking about a lot of them.

Anyway, I won't promise that I'll post EVERY DAY, but I'll do my best to not forget about this thing, again.