Paper Mâché Owl - Part 4 Finessing the Form

In my last blog post, I showed how the owl's body and head were joined.  Scroll back further to see the last few posts for more information on the start of this project.  Or, you can access the blog by going to folkartbycaroljones.blogspot.com

This blog post will be about smoothing out some of the rough edges.  The construction of the body left quite a few sharp edges that need to be dealt with before moving on to the wings, legs, and feet.  It is important to deal with the hard edges, because they will appear in the layers of paper mâché that will come after the  form has been completed.  In some projects hard edges might not be a problem, but an owl would look noticeably wrong with hard edges.   

 Cleaning up these hard edges will be done in steps.  It is not a case of performing one task and saying  "There, I fixed it".  I think it will take at least three steps before I feel that I have eradicated the hard edge.

The first step to removing the hard edges on the sides was to use a craft knife and carve off small pieces.  I carved on an angle so that the edge has a bevel.  The beveled edges were then covered over with another layer of masking tape.  In the picture shown, this step has been completed on the back edge of the bird.  The breast edge has not yet been cut.  It is not a great photo, but you might be able to see that the edge is a little less sharp.  

The lower edge was treated as described above.  

In this photo you can see the line indicating where the wing should be.  

A line on the lower portion of the breast edge indicates where the leg should come out of the body.  and form the bend for the lower leg.  This will later be covered over, but I had a few minutes and just wanted to make sure that I was on track.  It would be easier to make a correction at this point, than later in the process. 

Once the bottom had been beveled and taped, I added some folded strips of foil to cover the area.  The foil was folded over to create four layers.  This was done for both the upper and lower edges of the body.  

All of the foil was covered with a layer of masking tape.  This added a layer of softness and the hard edges no longer look so hard.  At this point, I only plan to cover the foil with tape.  I did not plan to re-tape the whole body at this point.  

Unfortunately, I forgot to stop and take a picture of this layer with tape on it, so you will see that on the next blog post.  

Look for that post on February 7th.  

Paper Mâché Owl Part 3 - Adding the Head

In the last blog post I had just finished making the body.  My first picture will show what the body looks like from the inside to pick up where I left off.  The two silhouettes of the body were given depth by adding cardboard ribs held onto the body with masking tape.  Scroll back to the earlier post for more information on this.

Once the body was put together, the entire body was covered with masking tape for added stability.  The tape is the first layer of protection for the cardboard from the upcoming covering of paper mâché.  

Readers, please for give the picture placement.  I am still relearning how to use the blog platform.  Hopefully, I will develop better composition as I go along.

                              

Inside of the bird body.

                                             Exterior of body covered with tape.

As you can see from the first picture the top of the birds body is more or less squarish.  Not to worry, I am going to fix that and attach the head.

The first step is to get rid of the square corners.  I used a craft knife to cut a triangular piece out of each of the corners.  The cut was one inch long across each edge of the top of the body and one-half inch down the side of the body.  This cut allowed the top and bottom edge to more easily fold inward.  In the photo below, that is more easily seen on the top section of the body.  

After the cuts were made, I attached some more cardboard strips across the top.  This will be the platform for attaching the bird's head.  I used some leftover strips that I used for the ribs. These strips are three and a half inches long and one-half inch wide (2.54cm x 1.27 cm). The strips are not very strong, and are easy top push down on, which will allow me to more easily position the bird's head where I need it to be.  The head is not an exact sphere, so a little give here and there will be helpful.

The head was attached to the body with hot glue.  I debated at this point whether to position the head facing forward or sideways.  Owls can turn their heads really far in each direction.  I eventually decided to have it facing forward, but it could just as easily have been placed the other way.

As yet, the owl has no legs.  That will be dealt with in a later blog post.  For the moment, I am using a box I had at hand to prop the project up for a picture.  

The next step is to make the head and body join each other better.  So the next step is to give the owl a neck.  Once  again, I returned to my small cardboard strips.  

I folded in the front and back of the bird to get the edges as close to the head as I could.  In the picture left, you can more easily see the cutouts on the edges (They look like small diagonal edges.) that allowed me to press the front and back towards the head.

Once the edges were pushed towards the neck, I started adding more  cardboard strips along the neck.  I cut the strips to form as smooth a join as possible between the head and the body.  I used hot glue to hold the strips in place.  The strips also add a little more stability to the head.

Please scroll down for the last picture.

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I will end this segment here.  As you can see, there are still some sharp edges that need some work.  I will be blogging about that in my next blog post.  Check back on January 30th, for the next installment.

Paper Mâché Owl Part 2 Owl Body

 I blogged about making the Owl head during my last post.  Today I will be writing about how I created the body.  

I want to remind readers that the owl body is built in stages.  Where I start will not be what the body looks like when it is finished.  Sometimes you have to add more, and other times you have to take something off to get the shape right.  I think a lot of people that try making things in paper mâché  sometimes have unfinished projects because they look at the beginning stages and say, "This is never going to work" and give up.   You have to have faith in process.  The project is not finished until it is finished.  

The shape of the body in this case is going to be dependent on the size of the bird's head.  The head is spherical and about three and a half inches in diameter.  (Picture 1).  I need the head to sit so that the width of the bird matches that diameter of the head.

Once again, I am starting with a flat piece and making it into a three dimensional object.  To get the body shape I consider the shape of the bird's body in order to create a profile.  The breast of the body is shaped like an arc.  The back of the shape is a downwards slant.  The shape will also have to include some bump outs for attaching feathers later in the project. So basically, I am trying to draw what I see and make a bird shape in order to make a template.  (Picture 2)  

The next picture will be the bird shape cut out of cardboard.  I cut out two of these shapes.  (Picture 3) In order to make the body three dimensional, I cut straight pieces of cardboard to act as supports that will hold the two sides together.  I used masking tape rather than hot glue for this just in case I needed to tear it apart and start over.  If the supports had been hot glued, it might have damaged the bird shape.  It was more work to do it with tape, but it could have saved having to remake the body profile.  

My husband and I had a good laugh over some of these pictures.  The camera on my phone has some type of an AI feature that identifies the picture and assigns a label to it.  In the case of each of these it suggested that these were food items.  We made some guesses as to what type of food it might have been.  I suggested that the head might have been mistaken for a cheese ball and the body might have been
some type of chicken leg.  My husband thought that the cardboard cutout might have been mistaken for a flounder.  

Template for bird

I only have a beginning picture of the supports going on.  I took one early, because I have a tendency to work until I get to a stopping point and forget to take more pictures along the way.  That happened this time so the final picture for today will show a view of the inside of the bird once all the supports were in place.  

Profile of Bird in cardboard

Supports for the body shape

The shape of the body in three dimensions.

So that is about as far as I have gotten to today.  Next blog post I will be showing the body and how I plan to attach the head.  At this point some people might look at this and say, "This is never going to work".  It will work, and next post I will reveal the body of the bird and how I was able to shape it.  Check back next week on January 23rd for the next installment,

New Project: Paper Mâché Owl

 

As I blogged a few days ago, I am returning to blogging after a few years absence.  I have not yet decided what day I will post yet.  I am still trying to find what fits best into my schedule.  I think it will be on Tuesdays, but it is not settled yet.  I hope readers will bear with me while I settle in to a routine.

I work mostly in paper mâché, although I also work in other media.  I have decided that my first project will be an owl.    Why an owl?  Because it is still within my general practice of making Halloween items.  Also, I think I need a break from making pumpkins.  After making several in a row, I want to try something different.

I love owls.  We used to live not far from a reservoir.  A great horned owl lived there.  He would start each morning with a great Hoot! Hoot! Hoot!  Hoot! Hoot! as he flew across the water.  The sound echoed across the water and could be heard for a long way.  As an early riser it was a great beginning to my morning. People who preferred to sleep late probably did not appreciate it as much.

How do I start to make an owl in paper mâché?  Basically, I am starting from something flat and making it into a three-dimensional figure.  My first task is to figure out the shapes.  This is pretty much how people look at shapes for drawing.  Do the parts of the bird resemble circles, ovals, spheres, squares, rectangles, cones, arcs, tear drops and so on.  Of course, the parts will not be an exactly those shapes, but are close enough to allow you to envision how the parts will need to be created.

In this case, the head is somewhat spherical with a cone shape for the beak. The shape of the overall body is similar to a tear drop.  The front of the body is an arc with a relatively flat back.   The wings are tear drop shapes and will cover a good portion of the upper back. You don’t really see much of an owl’s legs most of the time, so I just imagine what a chicken leg looks like.  The thigh is somewhat triangular and the lower part                                                                  of the leg is shaped like an elongated teardrop.

Once the basic shapes have been determined, the next item on the agenda is to determine how large you want the project to be.  Some owls are fairly large.  I was lucky enough to see a Great Horned Owl at a wildlife rescue center.  It was much larger than I had thought it would be.  I am not planning on doing full size.  My studio (also known as the spare bedroom) is overfull of projects.   I decided to make the head first.  The size of the head would determine the size of the body. The head is larger than it appears in the photo.  It is three and a half inches in diameter.

And so, it begins.  I should warn readers at this point that I am making figuring out how to make this as I go along.  I have no instructions.  I am strictly looking at the piece I am working on and say to myself, “How can I make that shape.  In other words, I am winging it.  (Pardon the pun.) I also wanted to let you know that the project is built up in stages.  It is not very owl like at the start.  

I picked up my first piece of newspaper and wadded it into a ball and wrapped it with tape.  I checked the size and continued wrapping more layers of newspaper and tape. Eventually, I had a ball of paper and tape that seemed to be the size that I wanted for this project.

Once the size seemed right, I added a beak.  Basically, the beak was a strip of cardboard to begin with.  I made the beak a little long at first.  It is easier to take some of it off than to start over making a new beak if it is too short.  Once I had the length as I wanted, I started building up the cone shape of the beak.  The beak seems a little large at the moment, but portions of it will be covered later in the project.

Next came the eye sockets.  Owls have very deep-set eyes.  At first, I tried to build up the sockets by using paper and tape, but it was slow going.  After a couple of layers, I decided to switch tactics and use rolled up bits of tin foil held down with tape.  I needed a couple of layers of the tin foil to get the sockets deep enough.  At last!  I have an owl head I can live with. 

This post is getting a little long.  I had hoped to get into how I started on the body today, but I think it is better to wait until next time.  I don’t want to make the post so long that people don’t want to read it.

Check back next week on Tuesday to see how the body will be made.

 

 

Returning to Blogging - New Pumpkin Pictures

 After a few years away from blogging, I am returning.  During the time I wasn't blogging, I have had some health issues and have spent a lot of time caring for an aging parent.  There was so much going on that I really had little time for art and creativity and less for blogging.  I had to make a choice between using my limited spare time to create something or to try to blog about what I was doing.  I chose to drop the blogging because being creative is what keeps me feeling grounded when everything around me is causing a lot of stress.

It has been a while since I used Blogger, so it might take me a few posts to get the hang of all the techniques.  I hope readers will bear with me while I catch up.

I was also experiencing some creative burn out.  It happens, especially if someone is trying to do variations on a theme.  For some time, I have been making papier mâché pumpkins.  So far I have made seven of them.  All except the last three have been posted on the blog.  I am posting the pictures of those pumpkins on this post.  

On one pumpkin, I was experimenting with making a more human face and teeth.  As one of my friends said, "This pumpkin really creeps me out."  I made the teeth myself out of paper clay and painted them.  In case readers are interested, you can buy plastic teeth on Amazon that look more realistic.  I chose to make them myself because I wanted to see if I could.

I was experimenting with some different techniques and materials on these two pumpkins.  They look much different from the other pumpkins mainly because I was trying out using house paint rather than acrylic paints.  I had read on the internet that some pumpkin makers were using house paint.  In some ways it makes sense.  The house paint is probably going to be more waterproof and less susceptible to ultraviolet damage than craft acrylics.  However, there are not a lot of choices in orange colors of house paint.  I found the paint to be overly bright.  Some artists have tried to tone it down by painting over the orange and wiping off black paint. I decided not to try it for those pumpkins painted bright orange because the color seemed to be expressing what I was feeling at the time.

One pumpkin appears stressed and about ready to go completely around the bend.  I made that one at the time I thought I if I could just power through everything I would get through the situations.  The jarringly bright colors, wide eyes, and the huge smile seemed to say how I felt as I tried to put on a bright smile everyday and just keep going despite what I was feeling inside.

The experiment for the last of the latest pumpkins was on reverse painting glass eyes.  I had not tried anything like that before.  When you look at the pumpkin in normal light, the eyes seem depressed or melancholy.  It seems that somehow I had once again managed to input how I was feeling into the pumpkin as I came to realize that the situation was not going to change any time soon and I was going to have to change my lifestyle and schedules to adapt to ongoing situations    However, when I put the pumpkin out for Halloween this year and used bright color changing LED pool lights to light it up, the eyes look very fierce in some colors and as if the eyes were on fire in bright yellow or orange.  So all in all, I still consider the project a win, even though it looks somewhat more depressed than I would have liked.

So one of my adaptation is to make something other than pumpkins for a while.  I still have an idea for at least one more, but it may have to wait a few months for me to begin on that.  I have been working on some other projects, and I have been working on other skills. I have another project to show you next blog post.

A new project has begun and I will be blogging about it in the next blog post.  I used to blog twice a week, but for now I am going to stick to blogging once a week.  I felt a lot of pressure to put on material twice a week.  I am hoping that starting slowly will help me stay on task.  So check in next week to see the new (non-pumpkin) project.