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).

Works in Progress

While I like looking at other peoples art, I'm usually more interested in seeing how they are making it, or what it looks like before it's finished. That attitude is what keeps shows like "How it's Made" on the air, or all those tons and tons of 'How To' sites going. People don't really want to make anything themselves, they just want to see how it's done! Okay, so some people want to create too, but most of the time, it's enough just to see the process.
It's that line of thought that inspires this post. I'm going to show/tell about what I'm working on right now. Specifically, two, maybe three dragon puppets.
All three involve paper mache, and two will be hand puppets, the kind that you stick your hand up in to move the mouth. The third is going to be a rod puppet, I think.
Anyway, thus far I've only gotten some of the paper mache done. I'm using a process I learned from Dan Reeder, who is not a man I know personally, but who has put out several books on the subject, and has a site devoted to such things....and a blog, and videos on YouTube about his process. His site is gourmetpapermache.com and it's great!
To say that I learned my process from him is not completely true, and maybe a little unfair to him, though. I've modified it to suit my own tastes, that's the beauty of Paper Mache...it's versatile. My method involves 'sculpting' a form, then paper mache-ing over it. Then I cut the paper mache off of the form.
In the picture are the two dragon heads for the hand puppets, and the 'egg' for the rod puppet. I'm not sure how successful these will be, but I'll keep you up to date. Thus far, I've not gotten too far on any of the three, but it's a learning experience for me. I've done a few (VERY few) puppets, and so the end results are still very much in question. Not pictured is the material that will be the dragons' necks, or the teeth and claws that I've sculpted from polymer clay. Wish me luck, and I'll update you as we have more progress!