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).

Paper Craft

Pictured here is Birdo, paper craft style. I made her (him? There’s some question to this critter’s gender, depending on what you read) from four sheets of cardstock and some glue. I didn’t design her (I like the idea of Birdo as a girl better. She’s Yoshi’s girlfriend!) I just printed the pieces, cut and glued the paper, and tada! I now have a new figure for the living room!

Of course, the bomb there is not Birdo, it's a paper craft version of the FallOut 3 Mini-Nuke...on top of my washing machine. It's really pretty impressive to see the range of objects possible with the craft. The Mini-Nuke looks great on my 'Villain Shelf' with my gas mask and dummy grenade and the like (I'll probably talk about the villain shelf later).

The whole Paper Craft movement/hobby or whatever it is, is really interesting to me. It also went pretty much right under my radar for way longer than it should have. I knew people did something involving cutting, folding, and gluing paper to make figures and what not, but I didn’t realize how big it had gotten, or how fun it actually would be.

I think that a really good hobby should be cheap, take up time, and provide a sense of accomplishment. Paper Craft does all three reaaaaallly well. New paper craft models are easy to get, and most of them are free. You just download them, print them, cut them out, and glue them together. It takes quite a while to finish a piece. Birdo took a couple of days of work at a fairly obsessive pace to finish, same for the Mini-Nuke. I was also very proud of finishing her, and have a neat little figure to display, now.

There’s almost as many websites devoted to this hobby as there are models, so rather than link to any one in particular, I’ll just say there’s tons. Now to get back to cutting! I think I’ll start on a mask, next.