This is just a quick announcement: My book, Make Animal Sculptures with Paper Mache Clay, now has a Kindle version. I think it looks best on the free Kindle for PC ap because the photos are nice and big, and they’re in color.

Now that I’m finished with that little project, I can go back to working on my latest book about paper mache masks. It’s coming along really well. I am particularly fond of the unicorn. And the Texas bandit. And the three Venetian masks (five, if you count the cat and the owl). And the Neanderthal skull is pretty cool…

There will be 12 projects in the book if I can squeeze them all in, and ten of them are done already, almost. I haven’t painted any of them yet, so I still can’t show them to you.

The best part, in my opinion, is my new method for making masks with just two strong layers of paper mache. I’ll post more when I’m closer to the finish line. Wish me luck.

And one more thing – I updated the blog recently, and we now have our image upload function working again. If you have any sculptures you’d like to show off, it’s now easier to do. You’ll see the upload button below the comment field on every page.

That’s all for now. Have a great week, everyone.

Dianna Standing in Front of Life-Sized Paper Mache Elephant Before it Was Loaded onto a Semi Truck and Shipped to Memphis for the Performance

Back in May Dianna Duffy left this comment on our blog:

Our high school was fortunate to receive the first license in the state of Mississippi this year (and across an 8 state area) to perform the Phantom of the Opera after being released to the public. After performing 5 nights locally to more than 3500 attendees, Amory High School was asked to perform a one night only performance at the famous Orpheum theatre in Memphis, TN.

This was Amory’s second opportunity in the last several years to perform at the Orpheum, however still the only high school to be invited there. When asked to perform at the Orpheum, our art teacher began looking for elephant patterns with a vision to create an elephant for the “Hannibal” scene to bump the scene up even more than it was shown originally at the school. I would love to send you pictures of our Phantom elephant based on your pattern from start to finish. I think you would be proud and we are ever so grateful to you for publishing your pattern! By the way, our elephant was over 7? tall and 10? long. The scene was incredible!!

My answer, of course, was YES – we want to see those photos.

Yesterday I received a whole set of photos of this fabulous creation, a full-sized elephant with all the fancy trimmings, along with these additional comments:

Included are some post Phantom of the Opera production pictures after our high school performed an incredible performance on the magnificent stage of the famous Orpheum theater in Memphis, TN, some pics in the museum after production, and a few of the elephant (named BAE) while being built with our director, Steve Stockton, climbing up to “test it’s sturdiness.”  : )  One of these days I will obtain and send a really good picture of the Elephant while it was in use on the stage at the Orpheum.  The elephant was built just for the performance at the Orpheum (after the locally sold out performances) and is now housed in the local museum in Amory, Mississippi permanently. Our high school art teacher, Nan Moon, found your site and used your pattern (with a few modifications) to create BAE.

Below are Dianna’s photos. If you’d like to see the elephant pattern she refers to, you can find it here, and a video showing how the pattern was used to make the original elephant is here. You can see they made some major changes, such as turning a baby elephant pattern into a full-sized adult, changing the the armature to keep it sturdy but reducing the weight, and adding some very impressive trappings. Congratulations to all the folks at Amory High School in Amory, Mississippi who made this event (and the wonderful paper mache elephant) possible.

Closeup of BAE Showing Trappings

Are we impressed, or what? Thanks, Dianna, for sharing these photos with us.

On a different note for those who expressed some interest in a proposed group project about intentional communities – I added an update to that post to describe an imaginary framework for our group project, which will reside on a new blog – and I think it will help us find just the right name for the new site. We’re already very close – now we just need to bring all your ideas together so the name reflects the site’s newly defined imaginary purpose and intent. You can go directly to the update here. A big thanks for everyone who has already participated – group projects are so much fun!

Today’s guest post is by Nick Allen, a journalist who somehow found the time to build this fabulous T-Rex out of items scrounged from garbage bins. I love the bumps on her back. Nicholas tells us how he made her below…

Paper Mache T-Rex

I made the T-Rex model using a simple interior wood frame, then shaped the rough body shape with chicken wire and packed it with polystyrene blocks, then filled out with building foam and carved off the excess until the body was formed. I made the tail out of a pair of old wooden skis, cut and fixed together with metal jubilee clips. I also used these to fasten the wooden toe struts together. The studded spine was done with rows of bolts with their edges rounded off with plaster.The entire body was covered with a heavy layer of gritty wall primer for solidity. The eyes, acquired from a taxidermist, are those of a wolverine and the teeth were all hand carved from bits of wood and set in resin. It is mounted on an old Soviet sports machine, which like other materials like the skis and wood, was retrieved from garbage skips in Moscow as a recycling project. For all her faults (stumpy legs owing to miscalculation of the frame, slightly unauthentic structure of skull, plus other niggling glitches I could cite), the model named ‘Marusya’ (affectionate form of Maria in Russian) has stood in Moscow’s Darwin Museum of Natural History since November 2006. I was recently told by a friend who visited the museum that schoolchildren pose by her for class photos, and that she was surrounded with small gifts at the New Year. What more could I hope for?!

Moving Marusya

Nick will soon be making a life size Tyrannosaurus head using a similar armature to the one he described above, and covered with paper mache clay. I can’t wait to see how it turns out. This is inspiring, and I’m very glad he agreed to let us all see her.

Paper Mache Hippo Wall Hanging

This is the second in the planned series of display masks/wall art/? – I haven’t quite figured out what to call them yet (suggestions welcome, as always).

I’m happy with both the cougar and the hippo. They’re now hanging on my office wall, and I enjoy their company. Black Bear is next.

I’m also enjoying the process of creating them with the clay > silicone mold > “instant” paper mache > acrylic paint > beeswax varnish. If you missed the recipe for the paper and plaster mix I’m using for these, you’ll find it on the cougar page. I wanted to make a video of the various processes, but I managed to break my video camera a few weeks ago. Oh well — it was a fun toy while it lasted…

One idea that keeps floating around in my mind is the possibility of designing architectural details to make with this material. The Victorians did it, but with an army of cheap workers and some industrial equipment that I wouldn’t be able to reproduce. However, it might still be possible to do it just for my house, using the techniques I’m using for the masks. A sculpted chair rail would be a fun project to start with, but I need to do some research to see if the pieces can be nailed or sawn, and if the surface would be too prone to chipping. I’ll keep you posted.

But the bear will come first, of course.

Ginny's Howlelujah Chorus

Ginny, one of our regular readers, sent this photo in her latest email update – and I fell in love with it.  I asked her if I could show you the piece here on my blog, just in case you haven’t signed up for her newsletter. She told me that:

The piece has  a cat, mouse, raccoon, and big brown bear.  I sculpted them from Creative Paperclay, over wire and Styrofoam, painted with acrylics, and sealed with varnish.  They will be available on my page on pfattmarketplace, and here’s the link.

The calico cat and the raccoon are my favorites – don’t they make you happy? Check out her online store to see the other items she’s been making this month.

Paper Mache Walrus Wall Hanging

Remember the walrus I used as an experiment to see if you can use the paper mache clay in a mold?  It took me a while to get this guy finished. (Arabian Oryx still isn’t done…) That’s the problem with my little experiments – once I know for sure the idea works, I get bored with the whole thing and I’m off to another project.

The clay mixture I used was slightly modified from the “regular” paper mache clay. However, the only difference is the substitution of glycerin for the linseed oil. I found that you can get a fairly decent impression with fewer voids with the glycerin than I got with my first tries using linseed oil. I gave Walrus a final coat of gesso, but I made sure it didn’t smooth out the slightly rough texture of the clay, which gives him a nice “organic” feel.

The tusks were added using a U-shaped piece of galvanized wire covered with aluminum foil and masking tape. They were firmly attached to the inside of the piece with more paper mache clay, and when they were well-attached I added the final coat of clay to the tusks. They were made nice and smooth with several coats of gesso. I didn’t paint the tusks, although I might go back and stain them with ivory-colored paint to make them look a bit more natural.

After seeing some of the wonderful paper mache masks that people are making, I can see some real commercial potential for using molds with the paper mache clay. You still have a hand-made, hand-painted product, but some of the time-consuming design work only needs to be done once. I think someone with a bit more entrepreneurial enthusiasm than I have could do well on Etsy or at next year’s art shows with this idea. If you try it, be sure to let us know how your own molded paper mache pieces turn out.

Oh – and remember the baby chicks I was going on about several months ago? They’re getting nice and big, and they’re having a good time out in the new garden. Here’s one of them having a conversation with my Golden retriever –I know there’s no excuse for sticking this in here, but I just felt like it

Chicken with Daisy

Paper Mache Tortoise Shell. Flaking

At the beginning of summer I made a Ploughshare tortoise out of paper mache clay, to test how well it would hold up out in the garden. For many months it did just fine – through rain, downpours, sprinklers, and lightly filtered sun. He lived under a rose bush, since I didn’t think he’d want to be out in the middle of the path, where some clumsy old lady (who could that be?) might trip over him.

Then a few weeks ago I moved the rose bush, and the area around the tortoise was temporarily bare. Within just a few days I saw the flaking that you can see in the photo above. The direct sun caused damage, even though all the rain did not.

I guess that means he’s waterproof (I used spar varnish) but not weatherproof.

Dang – I had a whole menagerie planned for my garden and yard. I thought it might keep me busy this winter, when I couldn’t be outside digging in the dirt or hanging out with the chickens. More research is needed.

This should not be insurmountable. Boats have been made out of paper, and they were fine, waterproof craft. And paper mache is not much different than any composite wood product.

Britta left a comment today, including a photo of her new Indian elephant, which she made the same way as the one in my elephant video, but using mortar instead of the paper mache or paper mache clay. If some concrete waterproofing stuff was painted over the elephant, she should last a very long time outside. But can the mortar be painted for brightly colored storks and other odd critters?

The failure on the tortoise is in the paint and varnish shell, not the paper mache clay beneath it, so perhaps acrylic paint would cause the same issues on a mortar sculpture. In fact, maybe it isn’t a problem of weatherproofing paper mache, but simply a matter of finding the right kind of paint to go on over it.

Any ideas? I know there are a lot of folks out there who want to use the paper mache clay or traditional strips and paste for outdoor art, but so far I haven’t found the solution to the weatherproofing problem. Your ideas will be much appreciated. (I think a sculpture garden would be so much fun!) If you think you know the answer to this problem, please leave a comment.

Baby Chick

I started this project to test a modification to the paper mache clay recipe that was suggested by Ginny in a comment on our paper mache clay page. Her idea of substituting glycerin for the linseed oil in the recipe started a lot of activity in the comments section, so I just had to do some experiments and see if it would work.

I just received my (larger than requested) order of baby chicks, so I’ve got chickens on the brain. That explains my choice of subject matter. I also wanted to create a bird that stands on two feet, since the balance issue has always been slightly intimidating to me. As it turned out, it really wasn’t as hard as I always thought it would be.

Wire Legs and Feet for Baby Chick Sculpture

I started out by bending some wire into a “U” shape, then adding all four toes. If I did this again, I would not double the wire on the back toes this way – it did make it easy to tape the feet together, but it made the back toe too heavy, as you can see in the photo above.

Baby Chick Legs Covered With Tape

The wire was completely covered with masking tape to prevent rust from migrating through the wet clay and ruining the final finish on the bird. If I make another bird I’ll look for some tape that stretches a bit better than masking tape, so the wire legs and toes will be smoother. I’m considering the tape used for bandages, but that’s for another experiment…

I also padded the thigh area at this point. Since I had some aluminum foil on my work table I decided to use it for padding instead of the usual crumpled paper. Of course, the paper would have worked just fine.

Padding the Baby Chick's Body

I started padding the body, building up the separate parts as I worked. The lower tummy was first, fitted inside the wire that connects the two padded thighs. Then I added the chest and neck, and then filled out some more on the back and added the head and wings. Since I was using aluminum foil, it was easy to pinch a bit on the front of the head to make a beak. All of the foil was completely covered with masking tape. When the body was filled out I bent the legs to make sure the bird would stand up without support.

Adding Paper Mache Clay to Baby Chick

Now I made up a batch of paper mache clay. Instead of the linseed oil in the recipe I used about two tablespoons of glycerin. (I found the glycerin at Rite Aid, next to the hydrogen peroxide. It’s also used in soap-making, and as a laxative suppository. I think I bought the last bottle in town). The clay worked nicely, and I was able to apply it in a very thin layer over the masking tape. Since we’re having very warm weather this week the clay dried very fast.

To make the clay seem more “fuzzy” than smooth, I first spread the thin layer of clay on the baby chick, then dabbed it with the end of a stiff stencil brush. You can see in the photo that it made tiny bumps all over the chick.

Paper Mache Clay on Baby Chick Sculpture

I used the edge of a knife to make tiny feathers on the tip of the chick’s wings. I took a ball-point pen apart and used the end of the ink tube to make the eyes perfectly round. I used extra clay to form the cheeks and beak the way I wanted them. The photo above shows the chick after the clay dried, just before I painted her.

Finished Baby Chick

The photo above is another view of the finished chick. You can clearly see in this photo that the back toe is too thick, as I mentioned earlier. Next time, I’ll do that part differently. Other than that, I think she came out quite well. The body shape and the legs make her a more challenging project than the paper mache bluebirds, but it would be fun to make up a few chicks for Easter decorations.

Naturally, I couldn’t stop myself from setting the “fake” chick in the brooder, just to see what the real chicks would think of her. I don’t think they were fooled:

Baby Chicks

I absolutely had to show you this colorful giraffe, made by a class of grade school kids with a bit of help from a parent with carpentry skills. A few days ago we saw a fairly realistic (very buff) paper mache panther mascot made by 7th and 8th grade kids, with some help from a very talented teacher. Now we get to see what kids will do when they let their imaginations and creativity go wild.

Paper Mache Giraffe made by students at Our Redeemer Lutheran School in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin.

I’ll let the teacher tell you about it – here’s what she said in her email to me:

Hello Jonni!

I have really enjoyed your website – your creations are incredible!.  I teach at Our Redeemer Lutheran School in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin.  Every spring, the sixth grade puts the year’s artwork on display in what we call our Gallery Opening.  We invite the parents, have some fancy appetizers and juice, and the kids act as docents for the evening.  They tell their parents what they have learned about the famous artists we have studied during the school year.  The paper mache project is our centerpiece.  This year, we had a wonderful dad who was willing to make the giraffe armature out of 2 x 4s and we took it from there.  The final covering is a mod-podged collage of bright tissue paper.

Keep the great projects coming!  You are a great resource for classroom art teachers!

Thank you!

Nan Burger

This morning I received a comment from a reader who has been searching for a pattern she could use to make a monkey or gorilla in paper mache, like the patterns I’ve been creating for the elephant, panda, and others here on this blog. Unfortunately, I haven’t made the pattern she’s looking for yet, and as far as I know, this is the only place where you can find them. I may be wrong, but I believe I invented the idea of using patterns for papier mache sculptures.

For months now I’ve been intending to write a book that includes some of the patterns I’ve already created, with updated instructions using the less-messy paper mache clay instead of laminated paper and paste. I would also include many new patterns, along with instructions that show you exactly how to make a pattern of your own, using a photo for a reference. I’ll even show you how to find photos you can use without violating anyone’s copyright.

Now that winter is setting in, and I don’t have any other pressing projects to do, it’s a perfect time to get started on that book. Your suggestions would be very welcome:

• What animals should I develop patterns for?
• What specific problems do you encounter with papier mache sculptures that you would like help with?
• Would you like to explore subjects other than critters?
• Is “paper mache clay” a good name for the recipe I’m using now? (I think “paper clay” is taken).
• And anything else you can think of…

I hope to get started just as soon as I get home from a short trip, so please keep your suggestions coming. I may be a little slow approving comments since I’ll be spending some time on a bus, (this country really needs a competitor for Greyhound), but your comments will show up as soon as I can get to an Internet connection.

Thanks for your help – and thanks for all the nice comments this blog has received in the past year. It’s so much fun to hear from you.