Scorpiumpkin

Wow – yesterday “Skwirl” sent us her submission for the Halloween Mask Party. Not a mask, certainly, but definitely creepy! What an imagination! In a comment Skwirl sent in recently, she called this creature a “paper mache pumpkin scorpion thingy.” It now has an official name – Scorpiumpkin. (You can see more of that deadly tail in the photo down below.)

I’ll let Skwirl tell you more:

Well I’m not totally done with him but all that’s left is the varnish so close enough! I had no idea it would take me this long.

I started off with a pumpkin shape using the instructions on Scott Stoll’s (Stolloween) site and then it just evolved into this.

The armature for the appendages is mostly coat hangers, crumpled newspaper and masking tape and the pumpkin body is just a plastic bag filled with crumpled paper.

It was covered with 3-4 layers of paper strips, and then covered with paper clay (Scott’s recipe) and details added.

The teeth and the stinger were made of Creative Paperclay because of it’s smoothness and sandability.

He was a lot more work than I anticipated, but the results are totally worth it! I feel like a proud mama!

Scorpiumpkin - Paper Mache Halloween Monster

Skwirl estimates the final cost to be somewhere between $25 and $50. And well worth every penny, I’d say.

Scorpiumpkin

On a totally different note, Skwirl also volunteered to be the very first one to submit ideas about an ideal community, over on our new blog. She titled her post The Best You. Be sure to check it out. And thanks, Skwirl, for sharing your Scorpiumpkin! What a nice Halloween treat!

June Slack's Pin Cushion

We have three more practical paper mache projects for you to see today, all submitted by June Slack. Another one is on the way – for some reason the submission form lost one of her photos, a minor technical glitch.

To see the full sized photo of this delightful pin cushion, plus her business card holder and her recycled waste basket (and soon, her hat stand) please click here.

On a completely unrelated note, I thought you’d want to know that Jonty, a paper mache artist from the UK who has left many useful comments here on this blog, may be in need of some support and well-wishing right about now. He’ll be away from his own paper mache projects for a few days or weeks as he recovers from a recent heart attack and the subsequent surgery. We do wish him a speedy recovery. You can leave him a message on his blog at http://darksidecreations.blogspot.com.

This morning Liz left a question on a previous post, and it’s one of those questions that you may be better at answering than I am. I’m sure she isn’t the only one who has hands that get dry when working with paper mache. Here’s her question:

I have a very practical and basic papier mache question. The skin on my hands is somewhat delicate (particularly in the winter) and I try to keep it happy. I keep wondering if PM artists just sacrifice the skin on their hands for their art or just how they protect their hands from deteriorating. I can’t imagine wearing even thin gloves to do PM. What do you do?

So – what would you do? Like told Liz, I’m not into self-sacrifice, but this just isn’t a problem I’ve run into. I do use Bag Balm on my hands when they get dry and cracked from gardening, (probably shows how old this country gal is getting), but is there a way to protect your hands from getting damaged in the first place? Any products that work really well, to protect the hands without making the sculptures all greasy, and without encasing the hands in latex? Your suggestions would be much appreciated.

Yesterday we received a comment on the paper mache halloween mask page that I wanted to make sure you didn’t miss. Diane sez:

An artist friend of mine introduced me to using blue “shop towels” on a roll for papier mache.
They’re great because they’re thick (so the work goes quicker and is stronger) and also because they’re quite supple and drapable while wet. The towels have usually been found in automotive depts and stores, but saw them the other day at my local Safeway right next to the regular paper towels. Might be fun to play around with anyway.

So naturally I had to run right to the hardware store and buy a roll. They’re a little more expensive than the cheap one-ply paper towels I’ve been using lately. However, they really are thicker, they soak up the paste in a very satisfying way, and they have no bumps like the paper towels used to sop up messes in the kitchen.

But that’s not what got me excited. The great thing (OK, two things) are that:

• The edges blend in very well as long as you’re careful to not let the torn edges roll up, and
• They stretch. Stretching is good because you can get them to mold around elbows and armpits, like in the photo below, without getting a lot of wrinkles. And that means you can use much bigger pieces of torn paper so your project goes faster.

I’m hooked.

Blue Paper Towels on Cat

This cat is still in progress, obviously. No face yet. The blue will need to be covered with gesso before the cat can get his spots or stripes (still haven’t decided) but I don’t think it will be an issue.

It was hard to find my camera to take this photo because I’ve been following my own cats around the house in the last two days, trying to convince them to do something cute so I could take their picture. And of course I set my camera down without thinking. I think I spend half my life looking for things I used just a few moments earlier and then left in some totally unreasonable spot.

All the cat photos are to help me get into the mood to create works for an art show that’s scheduled for the last week of November in Bellingham, WA. I’ll let you know more when things get finalized. If you live near B’ham I hope you can make it.

Make your own paper mache Halloween mask.

Yes, I know I’m too old to go trick-or-treating. I’ve been too old for about 50 years… But why should the kids have all the fun? The weird alien mask I made is probably not what you have in mind for your own Halloween costume, but the techniques used in this tutorial will work no matter what kind of face you decide to put on your mask.

My alien was inspired by my old create-a-critter game, which I designed years ago when I was teaching myself Flash animation. In fact, most movie aliens are designed in sort of the same way – you mix and match parts of real animals and come up with something that looks like it might live on another world.

I chose a tapir for the nose and topknot, (do a google search for “baby tapir” – they’re adorable!), and then added some frog-like eyes, ears borrowed from an African hunting dog, and gills so I could see through the mask. The eyes and ears were put in the “wrong” place. You, of course, will probably make a mask that looks like a witch, or a ghoul, or Dick Cheney, or whatever.

I decided that I didn’t want to wear the mask during my pretend walk around the neighborhood, so I put it on a “stick” made of heavy wire. That way I can raise the mask in front of my face during the trick-or-treat part of my walk, and hold it at my side between houses so I can see oncoming cars and other dangerous things. If you prefer to wear your mask in the normal fashion, you might want to make it in a helmet shape, like the ceremonial Dogon mask, or put an elastic strap around the back like the traditional rubber Halloween masks. Don’t feel like you have to follow my directions exactly – I just made this up as I went along.

If you come up with any useful variations to this tutorial, please let us know in the comments section. And we would love to see how your own mask turned out. If you aren’t sure how to add your photo to the comments, send me an email so I can help.

Creating Your Design

Step 1: Draw a life-sized image of the way you want your mask to look. If you intend to wear it, you’ll need to make it big enough to go over your face, so be sure to measure. If you want to see out (highly recommended) you’ll also need to measure the distance between your eyes and the distance between your eyes and the top of your head. Then draw your mask with these measurements in mind.

Then, using your drawing as a guide, draw the basic outline of your mask onto a piece of cardboard or foam board.

If you intend to hold the mask in front of your face instead of wearing it, you’ll need to create a handle. I chose a very heavy wire that I bought at the garden center. The wire was then bent to match the outside shape of the mask, and folded over at the bottom so no sharp edges would be left exposed. I then put the wire aside for later.

Cutting Out the Basic Shape

Step 2: Now, you cut out the basic face shape, which is the beginning of the inside form you’ll be making for your mask.  Then cover the edges with plastic tape. I used a wide tape sold for wrapping packages, but regular Scotch tape would be easier to work with. You use the plastic tape to keep the paper mache from sticking to your form.

I left off the ears, because I’ll be adding them later.

Adding Paper to the Mold

Step 3: Now you start adding crumpled newspaper to the front of your shape with masking tape. This will form the inside space of your mask. Just keep adding more paper and tape until you have the shape you want.

Adding Plastic Tape

Step 4: When you have the shape you want for the inside of your mask, cover it with the plastic tape. This will let you easily remove the paper from inside the mask. As you can see, I did not include my alien’s bulging eyeballs because I thought it would be easier to add those later.

Cover with Paper Mache

Step 5: Now add three to five layers of paper mache, made with torn strips of newspaper and held on with a simple paste made from flour and water. I used brown paper for my last layer for added strength, but plain newspaper would work just fine.

Don’t cover the eyes or nostrils or whatever part you intend to see out of.

I placed paper strips over the gill area that I’ll look through when the mask is finished, but the paper I chose was not heavy enough, so I later replaced them with heavier card stock. If you’ll be looking out of the eyes like a normal person, just leave the eyes empty of paper mache.

Allow the paper mache to dry completely.

Remove the Form

Step 6: Now turn the mask over and carefully cut through the tape that holds the cardboard or foam board backing to the crumpled paper inside the form. A sharp box cutter works well for this. Remove the cardboard backing, and then pull out the paper form. It may come out in one piece, or it may need to be removed a bit at a time. If it comes out in one piece you could use it again to make another mask.

If you’re using a wire to hold up your mask, now is the time to attach it to the outside edges of your mask with several layers of paper mache. Use a few pieces of masking tape to hold it into place so the paper mache can be added more easily. If you aren’t using the wire, you may still want to reinforce the outside edge with some paper and paste to give it a nice finished edge.

Adding the Final Details

Step 7: Now go ahead and add the final details. You can see in the photo above that my alien now has new gills, I’ve given her a topknot made from corrugated cardboard, (I made my giraffe’s mane the same way), and I’ve added the ears.

Covering the Mask with Gesso

Step 8: You’re almost ready to paint your mask. First, give it an undercoat of gesso or white paint so your final colors will be nice and bright. After I covered my mask with gesso and it was dry, I dropped some thickened gesso onto the mask to make some alien-like warts. I thickened the gesso with calcium carbonate (powdered marble) but a bit of flour would probably work too.

Painting Your Halloween Mask

Step 9: And finally, you paint your mask in any way you like. I used light yellow and orange tones, borrowed from a frog, and I finished the mask with a coat of acrylic matte varnish mixed with a very small amount of gold metallic paint. The metallic paint gave the mask a somewhat lizard-like sheen. It also catches the light so my mask will be easy to see when I’m scaring my neighbors into giving me candy, and it may also help me stay visible as I walk around in the dark. (OK, I’m not really going to walk around town on Halloween begging for candy – I really am too old for such things – but one needs to stay safe even in one’s fantasies, right?)

OK – now it’s your turn. Please let us see your mask when it’s done – you can show it off in the comments below. And if you have any suggestions that would improve on my ideas (and I’m sure you will), please let us know.

I just found this newpaper article about a Canadian sculptor in Yellowknife who creates museum-quality sculptures out of paper mache.

SOMBA K’E/YELLOWKNIFE – Sculptor Monique Robert is marshaling a myriad of monsters in midtown Yellowknife. Her work space on Forrest Park seems more like a whimsical museum than a home studio.

Sculptor Monique Robert depicted this stallion leaping through a wall using papier mache. The life-sized piece will be exhibited at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre from Sept. 14 to 27 as part of the Aurora Arts Society’s sixth annual Artsweek. – photo courtesy of Monique Robert

Robert fashions realistic-looking, supernatural animals loosely based on classical Greek and medieval European myths. Her retinue includes a muskox minotaur, dragons, giraffes, zebras, gargoyles and a centaur that is half-man, half-caribou.

“You can do whatever you want with (myth) and there are no rules,” she said. “I can come up with some really twisted characters that seem to come to life.”

Even more fantastical is the fact that Robert creates her life-sized creatures using a specialized form of papier mache. The sculptures are rugged and strong, with the look of painted wood and the solid, smooth texture of finely-sanded fibreglass. She experimented with the medium until she got the recipe just right.

“There’s nothing out there I’ve seen like it,” she said.

Read the rest of the article here, then go see her online sculpture gallery at MoniqueRobertStudios.com. Since we sw a paper mache dinosaur on this site just a few days ago, be sure to click on the photo of the orange Allosaurus. (Click any of the small photos, and you’ll get a slide show of detail photos. Very classy website. I’m jealous.)

She has a book coming out soon, and you can bet I’ll be standing in line to get my copy.

Well, he's some kind of bulldog...

The inspiration for this sculpture came from one of my first websites, which contains many original articles about choosing a dog from your local animal shelter. While I was doing the research for those articles I visited many Humane Society websites as well as taking a lot of trips to the shelter in Portland, Oregon. I found that one of the most common breeds in big-city pounds looked very much like this one.

Like most of those pound puppies, my “bulldog” is really a mutt. I think of this as the quintessential American mongrel – loyal, sturdy and courageous, he would have been a valued family companion in any frontier town. In big cities, where backyards are small, every dog he meets on the street is a stranger, and families work away from home for many hours a day, this is the type of dog that many people think of first when they hear someone use the term “too much dog.”

Name that breed?

So what kind of dog is he, really? The broken brindle coat seems to imply “American bulldog.” A quick search through the photos on the American Bulldog Rescue website suggests that this term is a euphemism for “pit bull.” Another creative way animal shelters use to not say pit bull  is “boxer/lab cross.” In this case, however, our pup might really be part boxer. At least his first owner must have thought so – why else would his tail be docked?

Bulldog sculpture, another view.

This sculpture is fairly large. He’s 17 1/2″ tall, 23″ long and 10″ wide. I used a press-board armature, as I did for the paper mache jackrabbits. I didn’t take photos of the bulldog in process, but he was made using the techniques you’ll find in the panda tutorial. He was finished with a glue/marble dust gesso, natural pigments, and acrylic paint, with a matte finish.

As I came close to finishing this bulldog sculpture I realized that he reminds me a lot of a dog we had when I was a kid. Henry J. was a great dog. He could chase balls for hours and he was very polite when I shared my ice cream with him (I don’t think my mother knew we both used the same spoon.) But he did have a few faults. One of them was being a bit too quick to fight when he encountered strange dogs, an embarrassing trait when we camped at State parks.

Here’s a sketch I did of Henry J. when I was about 10 years old, a very long time ago. He grew to be about 35 to 40 pounds, but the local animal shelter sold him to my grandfather as a Boston terrier cross. While he was still a tiny puppy we believed it. In truth, he was just a shelter dog, a mutt, and a wonderful family companion.

Last week I started out with 5 sculptures in process. I finished the polar bear a few days ago, and I should have the old gray mare done in the next day or so. One of the sculptures I started with didn’t make the cut and ended up in the compost heap (we can’t win them all…), so the last project in this group will be my Australian shepherd. Stay tuned.

Now I think I’ll go buy my bulldog a nice red collar.

Polar Bear Sculpture

This polar bear is a small sculpture, about 6″ high and 11″ long. I used a very thin wash of pearl white acrylic paint to give it a soft sheen. The project used the basic techniques shown in the lop-eared bunny sculpture. I did not use a cardboard pattern, as I did for the panda bear sculpture or the echidna.

My learning goal for this series of sculptures is to loosen up a little. I’m trying to do that by working from quick sketches instead of using photos for my models. With the polar bear I wanted to emphasize the forward slant of his back and the sense of him being on the prowl, which is shown by his raised front paw. I’m not sure I succeeded, but the project was fun.

I also spent some time in the last few weeks playing around with clay, to remind myself that spontaneity is fun. The paper mache process sometimes requires so much time between each step that it’s easy for me to forget the “fun” part. Whenever that happens, I feel it’s time to reconnect with that aspect of my art.

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5 Animal Sculptures in Progress

This has been a very hot week here in Eastern Oregon. I had to move some of my work from the front porch to the back deck. Before the move I was cutting into my early morning reading time and rushing into my studio to get work done before the sun’s heat drove me out, usually before 8am. In the photo above you can see the five animal sculptures that are now in process.

I also made a few changes to this blog. I noticed that many of the paper mache tutorials are old enough that they were falling out of the “recent posts” section in the sidebar. To make it easier for you to find the tutorial you’re looking for, or to just “shop around,” I put together a separate tutorial page, which you can reach from the links at the top of each post. Now you can just find the image of an animal sculpture you’d like to try, click on it, and go directly to that tutorial.

I’ll soon be putting together a gallery page to show the animal sculptures that are available for sale. My small house is quickly running out of room, and the materials are beginning to be expensive. (Relatively expensive, of course. Compared to other sculptural media, paper mache is very inexpensive.) My bulldog-type pound pooch I’m now working on, for instance, used up more than $5 worth of masking tape – and the Australian shepherd behind him in the photo above needed even more. I also bought some roll-ends of newsprint so I’d always have materials to work on without raiding the local want-ad paper stand. And I purchased some new paints online (why are art supplies so dang expensive?).

So – if I want to keep making these critters, I need to find new homes for some of them. If you’re interested in owning one of these sculptures instead of making one yourself, watch for the new gallery page, coming in the next few days.

Yesterday I started to make a paper mache horse. (See the first post here). To be slightly more accurate, it will, I hope, look like an appaloosa colt when it’s finished.

Yesterday I made a full-sized sketch and cut legs from plasterboard, using the sketch as a pattern. Today I used the same pattern to cut out the torso, neck and head of the colt out of cardboard.

Torso, Neck and Head Cut From Cardboard

You can see that I began to build up the volume of the chest and abdomen areas. I then used masking tape to attach the legs that I cut out yesterday.

Legs Attached

Legs Attached, Shown from Behind

I made sure the piece would stand up on it’s own, and it feels fairly stable.

Then I began to build up the muscles of the legs, shoulders and hips using newspaper and masking tape, and put more crumpled paper on the abdomen to round it out. I have not even started thinking about the neck and head at this point, although I am starting to get a bit worried about what I’ll make the mane and tail out of. But that’s a problem for tomorrow.

Then I put one layer of paper mache on the torso area, using newspaper strips and paste made from flour and water. The modeling isn’t even close to being finished, but I put on the paper mache because it holds much more securely than the masking tape. Once the paper and paste has dried hard I won’t have to worry about the legs moving. It also covers up the sloppy masking tape, so I can more easily see the true shape of the form.

Torso with First Layer of Paper Mache

Tomorrow I’ll round off the lower part of the legs a little, and use joint compound to finish the modeling of the muscles on the legs. I’ll use the compound instead of the paper because it’s heavier, and I think it will help make the sculpture a bit more steady on its feet. I also hope to get started on the neck and head, and figure out what to do about the main and tail – any suggestions are welcome.

Paper Mache Giraffe

I’ve mentioned my giraffe in a previous post, but I skipped over the directions because this was an experiment for me. This is the largest paper mache sculpture I’ve ever done, and part of the process wasn’t very pretty. In fact, I stopped taking pictures before the project was complete.

There were many times during this project that I didn’t believe it would ever work. I’m glad I kept going, though, because I’m very happy with her.

Today a reader  asked for more detail about how this project was done, so here goes. I’m afraid you’ll have to use your imagination towards the end, because I don’t have photos of all the steps.

Making the Neck

The project began with a cardboard tube that I made from pieces cut from a cardboard box. I cut several notches out of the tube in the areas where I wanted the neck to bend, and then taped it all back up again. You can see the progression from a straight tube to a curved “neck” below.

Giraffe Neck, Step 1

Giraffe Neck, Step 2

Giraffe Neck, Step 3

Giraffe Neck, Step 4

Before adding the head or any paper mache, I needed to weight the neck. Otherwise, the head would cause the sculpture to fall over. To do this I cut a circle of cardboard and cut notches into it, then folded it up to make a bottom for the tube. I then cut the tube almost all the way through about eight inches from the bottom, and taped the new circular piece inside.

I put some plastic cut from a kitchen garbage bag into this bottom piece of the neck and poured in some plaster. When the plaster was hard, the bottom piece was taped back onto the rest of the neck. The photos below show how this was done.

Giraffe Neck, Step 5

Giraffe Neck, Step 6

Giraffe Neck, Step 7

Giraffe Neck, Step 8

Modeling the Neck and Head:

As you can see in the photo above, a lot of crumpled paper and masking tape was added to give the neck its tendons and general shape. Once I was reasonably satisfied with the shape, I added several layers of paper mache. The first layer was made with strips of newsprint and flour and water paste, and the second layer was made from brown paper and paste. Some additional smoothing was done with joint compound, not shown.

- When I first discovered that you could use joint compound to smooth a paper mache sculpture, it made things so easy I thought I was “cheating.” Now I can’t imagine not using this inexpensive product, which you can find at any hardware store. You can see this being used on several other tutorials on this site.

Giraffe Neck after Adding Paper Mache

The photo below shows that I first tried to add the head, made from crumpled paper and masking tape, before adding any paper mache to the neck. I can’t remember why I removed the head, although I believe it was because the shape wasn’t quite right and I wanted to do it over.

Anyway, at some point a basic form for the head was added using paper and masking tape, and I then used Sculpey modeling clay over this basic form to build up the details of the head.

In the second photo below you can see this in process. Unfortunately, this is where I stopped taking photos. I had decided at this point that I wouldn’t be writing a detailed tutorial. And frankly, it was so exciting at the moment when the Sculpey suddenly became a giraffe that I didn’t want to stop and take photos. The sculpture was finally working, after spending days wrestling with the cardboard to form the neck.

Giraffe Head, Step 1

Giraffe Head, Step 2

When I was satisfied with the clay sculpture, I added several layers of paper mache and allowed it to dry.

I then performed a very delicate operation to remove the clay from inside the head. I felt the weight of the head would make it too easy for the sculpture to be knocked over by one of my playful dogs, even though the bottom of the neck was filled with plaster.

The head was cut in half, the clay and crumpled paper was removed, and the head was immediately put back together with strips of brown paper and paste. If the pieces are not put back together immediately they warp as they dry, and the two halves will not fit together.

With the underlying Sculpey and crumpled paper removed, the head is completely hollow.

Finishing the Giraffe

The ears were then added,  using cardboard pieces cut out of a cereal box. I made the mane from four long strips of corrugated cardboard. I spent a long time cutting “hair” into the strips by cutting almost all the way through the strips a few hundred times. I then notched the side of the two outside strips that would attach to the giraffe, so I would have tabs to tape over. The two inside strips were cut narrower, and glued to the outside pieces. The mane was then attached to the neck with strips of brown paper and paste.

The sculpture was then covered in several layers of glue based gesso, which I made from:

• 2 parts PVA glue (Elmers or Carpenter’s glue)
• 4 parts water
• 8 parts calcium carbonate (marble dust)
• And 1 part titanium or zinc white pigment, by volume.

Don’t feel you need to run out and buy these items. Ordinary gesso from the art store would work fine.

I then added the spots by mixing some home-made gesso using natural pigments – but acrylic paint would work for the spots. The eye was painted black with acrylic paint, and then a finish coat was applied.

You can see the mane a bit more clearly in the photo below, plus the odd shape that the head has when seen from the top:

Giraffe Mane, Ears and Horns

Giraffe Head, From Above

She looks very strange from the top.You can see that the eyes bulge a lot, and you can’t see the actual eyes at all from above. I think this allows the giraffe to have eyes focused on the ground, where their natural enemies might be lurking.

I used a lot of photos from the Internet to see how giraffes are built. I learned some interesting things while doing my research. Of most importance to me as an artist is that every species of giraffe has a different pattern of spots. My giraffe is a total mutt, and does not reflect any particular species or geographic area.

I also learned that biologists are still arguing over how many vertebrae giraffes have in their necks. You would think they could just count them after a giraffe dies in a zoo, but what do I know?

If you make a giraffe of your own, please let us see how it turned out.