Folk Art Pig-Part 12-Photos

In my last blog post I showed the armature construction for the upper muscles of the upper muscles of the hips.  The basic idea is for the area to be padded and rounded.  Once the paper plate and padding were secured with enough tape that I could see that I had the shape that I wanted I covered the plate with more masking tape to smooth out the edges.

Today I am showing the construction of  the lower muscles of the legs.  The muscle area of that part of the leg is basically fan shaped.  I used four layers of newsprint to create a fan shape.  I taped the fan into place with masking tape.  The ridges of the fan were next covered over with masking tape.  This left a fan shaped bulge to represent the muscle.

I think I have gone through two rolls of two inch wide masking tape and and three rolls of three-fourths inch masking tape by this point.

The hips and shoulders were constructed by the same method.  At this point masking tape is being used not just to hold pieces in place, but as part of the armature itself.  I am trying to get as much of the musculature complete as possible before I start adding the layers of paper mache.

At this point the pig is actually looking a bit buff.  The shoulders and hips are large but his torso is thin relative to the large muscle groups.  Next blog post I'll show the work on the middle of the pig.