This week I’ve been doing more experiments, while also playing around with modeling clay portraits. The portraits were just for me, because I’m trying to learn how to do it. You can see a few (and also see what our fellow sculptors have been up to this week) on our Daily Sculptors page.

All of my experiments have involved the same little bunny – the one shown here. I wanted to find out:

1. If a foam shape can be used as a permanent armature for a paper mache sculpture, so that a design could be reproduced without starting from scratch, and
2. If flexible foam can be used as a re-usable form for a paper mache mask, even if it has deep undercuts, and
3. If a UV-absorbing varnish can effectively waterproof paper mache, without causing color changes, yellowing, cracking, or other problems over time.

Paper Mache Bunny, Outside Near Lamb's Ears

We won’t know how well the varnish works until the bunny has been outside for a few months, but the foam portion of the experiment went well. Here’s what I did:

I made the little bunny with modeling clay, and then created the silicone mold and a plaster of Paris support mold, shown below. I had a piece of corrugated plastic left over from building my greenhouse window last year, so I used it for the base of the mold. I used hot glue to attach the base to the silicone mold, and then clamped them all together, just to make there was  a tight seal.

Silicone Bunny Mold

Two part flexible foam was mixed up and poured into the mold, and allowed to set. It was ready to come out of the mold in about 30 minutes.

Foam Bunny

For the bunny shown here, I covered the foam bunny with one layer of fast-setting paper mache paste and blue Scott shop towels. I did not use a release, so the paper mache stuck fast to the foam. The recipe and method of using the paste and shop towels are in the videos about how to make a Pantalone mask. It would have been better to add two layers of paper mache, but I only used one.

Foam Bunny Covered with Paper Mache

The bunny was painted when the paper mache was dry, and this morning I coated it with a solvent-based acrylic varnish with anti-UV properties. The varnish is supposed to be waterproof, and it’s intended for outside use. It’s made by Pebeo. I’m sure there are other UV-absorber varnishes out there that would also work.

Some people use spar varnish over the final layer of paint, but when I tried that the sun cracked the varnish and it all chipped off. Rich uses spar varnish under the paint, right on top of the paper mache. He then paints, and then uses deck sealer over the paint. (I hope he’ll correct me if I got this wrong.) He says he’s had really good luck with this system of waterproofing paper mache. But, just to be a contrarian, I wanted to see if this anti-UV varnish could be used effectively after the paper mache is painted, without any other form of protection. We shall see.

I’ll stick him out under the lilac bush when the varnish is dry. Wish him luck – he may need it.

I’m happy with the way the paper mache covered the foam. I didn’t actually design the original clay model with this in mind, so the details were not exaggerated the way they should have been if I were thinking ahead. (That’s why I only used one layer of paper mache.)

However, since the foam was flexible, it was possible to press the pasted shop towels deep into the lines around the eyes and toes, so he still looks very close to the original. I think it’s possible that I could have used the second layer of paper mache without losing all the detail.

I don’t think this system would be terribly useful for most people, but I think if someone sold paper mache items and had one particular design that needed to be made over and over again, having the foam core ready-made could be a real time-saver. But the piece would need to sell for a price that covered the extra expense of the silicone mold and the foam.

I can also see this being used to make just one copy of a modeling clay sculpture with paper mache, if the piece was “important” enough. The molds and foam are expensive, but not as expensive as bronze, by any means. (I may actually try that, if I ever make a figure sculpture worth saving for posterity.)

Now – for the final question: Can you use flexible foam for a re-usable mask form? To find out, I used a release on another foam bunny, and covered it with paper mache. When the paper mache was hard, I carefully pulled the foam out. It worked, even though there are deep undercuts around the ears and under the chin.

Inside of Paper Mache Bunny

This is also something that wouldn’t be terribly useful for most artists. However, I can imagine a theater prop-maker needing masks for an entire Greek chorus, and needing all of them to be the same. Other mold methods would usually work just fine, but if there are deep undercuts and the mask-maker doesn’t want to use multi-part molds, this method would work rather well. Or if you need several elephants or masks with large antlers, you could combine both ideas – leave the foam inside the horns or trunk, while removing the foam from the face area.

I ended up with more bunnies than any one person needs, but I learned a few things and I had fun with it, even though I’m not quite sure how I’ll ever use what I learned. Someday, though, I’ll bet this will come in handy…

Well, it took a bit longer than usual, but my paper mache cat is done. I made a video showing how I painted my cat, (shown below). If your paper mache cat is a portrait of a different feline, or if you added less texture,  you’ll want to use different colors and probably smaller brushes.

I used very large brushes and a very loose painting style because of the rough texture I added to my cat. If I did this cat again, I probably wouldn’t add so much paper mache clay, but I do like the way she turned out.

She’s now sitting on a table with a few other cats, and I’m beginning to wonder if that bobcat’s intentions are honorable…

How I Painted my Paper Mache Cat:

And here are a few more photos – a close-up of the finished cat, the photo I looked at when painting her eyes, and the original photo that I used to make the pattern. If you missed the previous lessons, you can find Lesson #1 of the How to Make a Paper Mache Cat here.

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