Carousel-Part 35-The Johnny Cake Faces-Photos

July 4th is a holiday here.  I did not get a chance to post on Wednesday because I was busy with holiday preparations.  Some of the festivities took place on the actual day, and more are going on this weekend.  I've enjoyed the time with family and friends.  It has unfortunately put me behind on working on the carousel.  I am getting back to work, and hope to complete this phase of the work shortly.

What I have been up to this week is making the face plaques that will go above the mirrors on each side of the housing.  You may have read in a previous blog that my mother had once owned a Johnny Cake face that had been on an antique carousel.  It is this type of face that I am trying to reproduce for my carousel.  If you read my earlier blog post, you may remember that my Plan A for making the plaques did not work out to well. The pieces are so small that attempting to make the features out of clay produced a face that was way out of proportion to the carousel.  Now I am working on my Plan B.  It seems to be working.

This blog post will show the development of one of the faces.  (Each face will be different.)  To make the base of the plaque, I cut out three circles of poster board and glued them together.  I also traced circles onto a piece of paper and used those circles to sketch some rudimentary faces.  You can see some of the sketched face in the first picture.  I didn't want to show the whole sketch at this point.  I like to keep a few surprises.  Actually, the face may not turn out to look exactly like the sketch.  However, I now have a reference for placing the features, and that's what matters at this point.

Once the face was glued to the base, I began to cover the face with little bits of foil and tape to build up the features.  I painted each area with glue before placing the bit of foil on it.  Because the face is so tiny, I had to hold onto these small pieces of foil with tweezers in order to place them properly. Sometimes I used a small piece of masking tape to help hold a bit of foil in place.  The process of building the face has taken a fair amount of time, because I sometimes had to stop and let the glue set up before I could proceed.  Otherwise, the piece I had so carefully placed would slide out of its spot.

Once the facial features had been build up to my satisfaction, the face was covered with a layer of strip paper mache'.  Although in this case, strips are a bit of a misnomer.  The "strips" are only about a quarter of an inc long by 3/8 of an inch wide.  I guess it would be more accurate to describe it as patches of paper mache'.  I did not take a picture of it covered with paper mache' at this point because it would be a big disappointment.  Right now it is very hard to distinguish the features that I so laboriously placed.  But, once the faces are completed and painted, the contours created will enhance the painted features.  At least that is the plan.  It sounds good on paper.  I hope it comes off well in practice.  If not, its on to Plan C.