Goblin Halloween Diorama - Part 30- Photos

First layer on the armatures.

I'm very late posting today.  Apologies to my regular readers.  This morning we were in update purgatory.  There was a big set of updates for the computer posted yesterday.  We live out at the edge of farmland.  There is no such thing as high speed internet out here.  I just had to wait until everything finished downloading because the updates were downloading at a snail's pace.  We seriously need more band width.  Anyway, it did give me time to get enough work done to have a new picture for today's blog.

Goblins will lurk around the house and trees.

I spent the better part of the last two days pondering about the goblins for the diorama.  What do I want my goblins to look like?  What actions are the goblins performing?  Are the goblins only imaginary: a mental construct generated by the sight of the abandoned house?  How can goblins further the story line?  Are goblins really lizards, and their shape only suggests goblins?  Should goblins have tails?  How large should the goblins be?  What color?  What construction method shall I use?  All these questions circled around until I figured out an answer.  I suppose I've really had a good long time to think about this, but I did not really have to come up with a concrete answer until now.  Until this point, the goblins were just some abstract consideration.

So now I have some answers.  I decided that the goblins needed to be small, menacing creatures.  I have not yet decided as to whether their skin will be gray/green or devil red.  I guess that question will be decided once the creatures are ready to paint and I can see how the color choices actually look.

These goblins are going to be very small to stay in scale.  The door of the house is only two and a half inches tall.  If you consider that scale as human sized, then these goblins will only be about an inch to an inch and a quarter tall.  It is really tough to work on such a small scale.  With that in mind, I began making the armature for the goblins out of magnet wire.   This is a very thin wire used to make magnetic coils.  I made six armatures.  I only plan to use five, but it is nice to have an additional one made in case I mess up one of them. 

Each wire armature has been covered with its first coat of cornstarch packing peanuts.  I cut the peanuts into small bits, and the small bits into halves or quarters.  I coat the packing peanut bit (One piece at a time.) with a mixture of glue and water and press it onto the armature.  Then I glue another piece on the back side so that section is covered.  Then I move on to the next section.

The glue is close to a fifty/fifty mix of Elmer's Multipurpose glue and water.  Since the pieces I am working with are so small, I did not dilute the glue in advance.  If the mixture is too thin, the bits of packing peanut dissolve into a slurry.  I found that it was better to dip a small watercolor brush in the paint, smear it onto my pallet (in this case a bit of aluminum foil is covering the pallet),  then dipping the brush into water and mixing it with the glue.  I add more or less water as I need to keep the glue at a thickness that is spreadable on the packing peanut bit.  The brush I am using is a child's craft paint brush. The brushes are inexpensive, and can be thrown away when it is too covered with glue to be useful.

Anyway, the first layer of cornstarch packing peanut is on the armature.  At this point, it is only a basic body shape.  The armatures do not have heads yet.  The goal of the first layer is only to get something to stick to the armature.  From there, the shape will be built up layer after layer until it looks like I want it to look.  This is one of those times when you have to have faith in the process.  The beginnings of it do not look like it will look when the project is finished.  Beginners are often discouraged at this stage.  It takes a few big project in making things to understand that building a figure is a process. 

At this point, the goblins are not yet posed.  Once the figure is build up a little more, each goblin will be posed for its particular position.  Any cracks that form during the posing will be covered with a piece of packing peanut or filled in with a cornstarch  slurry. 

So this is where I will end for the day.  The goblin forms are starting to take shape.  It will be a few days before they become something recognizable.  You can only do so much at one time.  The figures must dry before another coat can be added.  Trying to do too much at one time adds too much moisture to the piece and the cornstarch dissolves into a slurry.  I would normally have made these figures out of papier mache', but I had a small amount of cornstarch peanuts left over from another project.  Since it is unlikely that I would have another project small enough to use them up without running out, it seemed like the time to use them.  Papier mache' would only have been marginally faster.