Green Man Pumpkin - Part 9- Adding Leaves to the Face

As regular readers may know, I am working on two big projects at once.  One project is this Green Man Pumpkin, and the other is the paper mâché carousel.  I just completed an animal for the carousel, so I am now back to working on the Green Man Pumpkin.  When I last left off from working on this project, I had just added the face to the pumpkin.  The first photo shows where I hit my last stopping point on that project.

Since that photo, I have added more paper mâché strips to the area that has the hot glue and masking tape holding on the face.  Once that was complete it was time to start adding the leaves.

One question that some friends have asked is whether adding the leave to the protruding face is going to cause the pumpkin to over-balance.  The answer is: yes, it will.  However, I have a plan to deal with that, but the fix will not be implemented until all of the leaves are on the face and around the back of the head.  There is little point in trying to fix the balance until everything is in place.  Until then, the pumpkin may need to be propped up in various positions while I work on it.  At this point in the project, the pumpkin is still balanced and needs no assistance.

I planned to make the leaves out of a paper clay.  In the past I have made paper clay from newspaper for one project and from dryer lint for another project.  Both worked well.  I had considered experimenting with paper mâché clay made from toilet paper for this project but decided to put off the experiment in favor of the two partial bags of Celluclay I found while I was digging through a box of tools I use in my crafts.  

The reason I have two partial bags is because my first bag of Celluclay was gray and the other was white.  The first bag was more clay than I needed for the project.  There was not enough of it left for the second project.  When I went to the craft store to buy more, they only had the white Celluclay in stock.  I needed it right away, so I went with white.  Instead of mixing the colors, I just went with the new bag.  So, then I had two partial bags of Celluclay.  Economic times being as they are, I plan to use both bags to make this project.  I looked online, and a pound of the Celluclay is between three and eight dollars more expensive than the last time I bought some; depending on where you shop.

To begin, I covered the eyes of the pumpkin to keep from getting so much of the paper clay on them while working on the project.  To cover the eyes, I used a small piece of Press and Seal.  I rubbed the sticky side onto the eye and used a sharp craft knife to cut off the excess.  The Press and Seal will peel off easily when I am finished with the paper clay and paint.  That will leave only a small amount of paper clay and/or paint that will have to be removed by scraping with a dental tool. The eyes are not lit in this photo, but you can see that they are already looking cloudy from the paper clay that was on my fingers.

This photo shows the first layer of leaves on the pumpkin.  I expect that there will be at least three layers of leaves on the face.  There are also leaves under the lips and chin, but they are not very visible in this picture.

This portion of the project is going to take a while.  I can only put a few leaves on at a time.  The main problem being that while working on a rounded pumpkin I would lose sight of what work had been done on the other side of the pumpkin and end up putting my hand down on the wet paper clay wrecking the work I had just completed.  I could only do about three or four leave a day.  The paper clay needs to dry a day or two before adding more.  I do not want anything to mold because it was too wet for too long.  On the plus side, this product has a hardener already mixed in, so no need to add anything but water.

Now, on with making and adding the leaves.   

I drew some leaves.  They are not full size because a full-size leaf would have been too large.  I will be using the oak leaf(ish) one for the face and may use the other leaves on vines and in other places in this piece. I keep one for a template and made several for the face. I was not sure how many I would need so best to keep the pattern on hand.

I started by mixing some Celluclay.  I only mix a little at a time because I only have a little time for crafting at any one time.  The older bag said that kept in the refrigerator it would last indefinitely.  (For the record, the bag did not keep that well.)  The second bag said it would keep in the refrigerator for two weeks.  However, I prefer to just make up what I am planning to use that day.  I mix eight rounded tablespoons of the Celluclay to four tablespoons of water and start to mix it with my fingers.  (I wear gloves.) It does not look like it is enough water at first, but do not be tempted to add another tablespoonful of water.  It will be too much.  Keep kneading with your fingers.  If it is still too dry, dip your fingertips in water and add a little water to the mix a little at a time.  Eventually it will mix in until a soft dough is formed. (If the mix gets too wet, add more of the Celluclay.)

The next step is to mix up some water and white glue in a separate container.  I don't need a lot, just a few tablespoonsful.  I use roughly a sixty/forty mix, but I don't measure it.  I just eyeball it.  I want it to be thoroughly diluted until the glue does not leave any trail when you drag a tool through it.

After that, use the paper leaf to determine where you want to place the leaf on the face before going to the clay.  The leaves are made of cardstock, and they will absorb water from the clay very quickly.  

The clay will shrink as it dries.  You have to account for that when you make the leaves.  I add clay to the back of the leaf pattern about half an inch thick (1.27 cm).  That way, there will still be a fairly raised leaf motif on the face when it is dry.  I work with clay tools and my fingers (I wear gloves) to make the clay conform to the leaf shape.  (If I were using a heavier sculpting medium, I could roll it out flat, place a leaf on it and cut it out with a knife.  However, that is not going to work well with this medium. It is too soft.)  

Once the leaf is covered in clay, I use an old brush and brush some of my diluted glue on the clay and also on the pumpkin in the area where I plan to place the leaf.  This is a little insurance to make sure the clay is going to stick well.  

It is important to work quickly on this.  The cardstock wants to adhere to the clay.  I flip the leaf over and press the clay to the face, giving it a little pressure to make sure that it sticks well.  The pressure will cause some of the clay to ooze out from beneath the leaf.  Using clay carving tools and my fingers I smooth the clay back down under the leaf shape.  Then, I gently lift the leaf pattern off of the clay.  There may be a little more shaping that needs to be done after the leaf comes off.  It may deform slightly.

You could just leave the pattern on the clay if you wanted a smooth surface, but I wanted to be able to carve the veins of the leaves into each leaf.  I also liked having a little texture but not too much texture.  After the leaf pattern is removed, I a clay tool dipped into my diluted glue mixture to smooth the clay so that it is not quite so rough. 

Once the dough has been smoothed, I carve in some leaf veins.  What I found from my first few leaves was that the cut made by the carving tool tended to widen a little too much as it dried.  I am not overly worried about that on this first layer because they will be mostly covered by the next layer of leaves.  What I did for the other leaves was to use a mechanical pencil to carve in the leaves.  The small lead size (0.7 mm) worked out quite well for this project.

This completes the first layer of leaves.  By my next blog post I hope to have pictures showing the second layer of leaves on.  I do not think I will have time to complete the third layer by that time.   Anyway, slowly but surely the project is making good progress.  Check back next week for new photos.

Completed Carousel Ram - Part 3

When I left off blogging last week, I noted that the ram's nose was very square and that I would be working to correct that.  I think I must have put the last interior support right at the end of the nose.  It also has toothpicks on each side to help support the face.  The supports were strong enough that it would not allow the face to be pinched and squeezed inwards to collapse that section of the nose.  Rather than take it apart, I decided to shape the nose by adding a piece of aluminum foil and hold it in place with hot glue and masking tape before covering it with layers of paper mâché.

That only netted a partial success.  The square edges of the face still showed up.  So, I started on my next fix for the face.  This time I had better results.  I used a sharp craft knife to shave off the squared off portions of most of the face.  Then I covered it with more tape and paper mâché.  

I also added more layers of paper mâché to the horns to stiffen them.  The horns were a little difficult to deal with.  I had to work around them while adding the layers of paper mâché.  The glue on the horns did not stand up to the pressure well.  I had to go back and add more hot glue on a couple of occasions.  However, time and patience prevailed and now the animal is covered with all its layers of paper mâché. 

At least that was my thought for the moment.  I am considering adding some paper clay to the body and carving into it to give the impression of a ram's thick curly coat.  It will save some time later in the project because I won't have to do so much painting to make it look as if the animal had a thick curly coat.  

Other than that, I consider the ram pretty much finished.  As with the other carousel animals, he will be going into the box waiting to be sanded and painted.  I want to get all the animals to the same point of construction before I start sanding.  Sanding is my least favorite part of the project.  

How many more animals to I plan to make?  I am not sure.  If I do at least one more animal, I could make a small carousel.  If I choose to make five more animals, I will be making a larger carousel.  I am leaning towards making the larger carousel.  I am actually getting a couple more ideas for carousels that don't necessarily involve animals.  They may go onto my list of future projects.  Sometimes I get into doldrums where I am not enthusiastic and cannot think of what I might want to work on.  It is nice to have a few ideas in store.

I will show one last photo next week if I get the chance to add some paper clay to the body.  I am still undecided on that, but I have started working with paper clay on my other project, the Green Man Pumpkin.  If I have some paper clay left over I will add it to the ram.  

The bottom photo shows how I plan to have the ram mounted.  I want it to look as if it is leaping.  It may look a little different than most carousel animals, but I think it will be fun.  

Next blog post I will be back to blogging about my Green Man Pumpkin.  Please check back next week to see the first set of leaves going on the pumpkin's face.

Paper Mâché Carousel Ram - Part 2 - Taking it from Flat to Three dimensional

This is one of those times that I started crafting and did not stop to take a critical photo.  I will include a photo of a different carousel animal to show the part I missed taking a picture of for this animal.  Actually, I missed a couple of shots.  

This photo is where I left off last time on the blog.  I had cut out four copies of my figure.  Two of the figures have toothpicks glued to them with hot glue to strengthen the flimsy card stock.  I was not going for an anatomically correct skeleton, obviously.

This second photo shows where I have covered one of the figures that had the toothpicks glued on covered by one of the figures without the toothpicks.  These pieces were carefully matched up to make it even and then hot glued one section at a time make sure the sides remained even all around.  Now the toothpicks are no longer visible and actually support both sides of the cardstock figures.  After that, I taped over the cardboard figures with masking tape.  The tape will offer a barrier so that the cardstock will not become soggy.

I used small pieces of corrugated cardboard strips to act as spacers between the two ram figures.  If you read the last post on this, you may remember that there was some problem with the book on carousel animals that I had purchased.  The instructions for the carousel goat were missing.  So, I just had to wing it to figure out what size these strips should be.

This is a picture of the spacers as I placed them on one of the carousel horses.  Each piece of cardboard is hot glued onto place.  Then the second piece of the figure was glued down on top of the spacers.  It sounds easy enough, but it takes more time than you would think to figure out where these spacers should be placed to give enough support without being in the way of upcoming work and making sure the pieces remain even. Remember that sooner or later, the pole that will hold up the animal will need to be placed at a future point in the project.

Now, back to the Ram.  After the spacers are in place, I used a strip of an old file folder to cover the open areas along the front, back, top and bottom of the carousel animal.  

I have found that the least aggravating way to get this done was to make the strip a little wider than the area it was to cover, making sure that the edges extended over both sides of the animal.  I went along the support posts hot glueing each one to the file folder strip.  

When gluing the strip was completed, I used a sharp craft knife and followed along the edge of the animal to cut off any excess so that the file folder sits flush with the edges.  There are a few gaps especially around some of the curves.  That is okay.  They will later be covered with tape.  The upper and lower areas of the legs are not built up at this point.  That will be done later.

This picture shows the animal from the rear view.  I have also added the base for the Ram's horns and the tail.  In the top photo you can see the Ram's tail as part of the initial outline.  It was cut off when I made the figures because a tail on each side of the animal would have been wrong.  After the Ram was taped, I added a tail using bits of carboard, hot glue, and tape.  

The horns are not easy to see in the photos, but they are made from small pieces of a chenille stem.  With twenty-twenty hindsight, I should have used something else.  It worked, and it fulfilled my need for something that had a little bit of bulk, but it was a little too flimsy.  

It was hard to keep the horns from bending out of place while I was trying to cover it with paper mâché.  Since the animal is so small, it was difficult to wrap the strips around the horn.  Any movement to the horns caused the chenille to detach from the head.  The weight of the paper mâché was also a factor. It is heavy compared to the strength of the chenille stem.  I had to go back in a couple of times with more hot glue to keep them on.  They still seem a little fragile.  I will need to put more paper mâché on the base of the horns to keep them from falling off the animal.  

If I were to make the horns over again, I would probably have used a sturdier piece of wire.  Also, instead of just gluing the wire to the head, I probably would drill a hole through the head, inserted a wire, and glued it into place.  Then I would have bent the horns to their proper shape.  It might have saved some time and trouble.  

In the long run, things worked out okay with the horns.  Could I have done it better?  Maybe.  It is also important to remember that the way one person works is not going to be the same as another person would do it.  This could be from materials available or how much of a mess one can deal with on any particular project.  My motto is "Use what you have."

From the picture on the left, you can see that the Ram's nose is very square.  That was not intentional but caused by the straight edge of the support pieces.  Next week in my blog post I will show how I dealt with this issue.  

Beginning to Create the Next Carousel Animal - A Ram

 Regular readers know that I have been working on two long-term projects at once.  This helps me to from getting burned out on either project.  Making the animals for the carousel in paper mâché is somewhat repetitive in some segments so I need to break it up.  I had reached a good stopping point on the Green Man Pumpkin Project, and now I am ready to work on the next paper mâché animal on the carousel project.  This animal is going to be a Ram.  

This is my second carousel.  The first one was very small.  The base of the carousel was only about six inches in diameter.  The animals were only a couple on inches in length.  This time I am trying to make a carousel where the animals are about four to six inches long.  I have not worked out the size for the base yet.  I will have to see what works with the animals I am making.  Why work so small?  The main answer is that a carousel can take up a significant amount of space.  Very few people have the space for a large craft item these days.  I certainly don't. My house is already covered with many of my creations.  I keep them until I grow tired of them, then they are sold, but I really need to do more about getting them out the door.

So on with the first session of the Ram.  I debated about the horns on the animal.  Some goats have small horns, others have great curling horns, and yet others have longer straight horns.  I finally decided on curling ram horns, but I am going to leave working on the horns for later in the project and just have small jutting horns on the head for proper placement.  The horns would be in the way during much of the project.

First, I needed a pattern, and I turned to my book on carving carousel animals.  That is when things got a

little weird.  The table of contents said there was a pattern, but that part of the book seemed to have been omitted.  I looked in my other book on carving carousel animals and it had a goat pattern.  I decided to use that as a starting point.  I modified the pattern for the legs.  I turned it from walking to having all four legs off the ground as if it were leaping.  I also modified the face area.  The pattern had an open mouth.  It was changed to a closed mouth. Making those teeth would have been difficult.  I am working so small that it would be too hard to do that in paper mâché.

Once the pattern modifications were complete, I transferred the pattern to some cardstock.  You don't have to use cardstock, it could be a cereal box, file folder, or some other type of thin cardboard.  I just happen to have an abundance of blue cardstock.  

I cut out four pieces of the pattern.  Two of the pieces have toothpicks glued to it with hot glue to make the cardstock a little less flexible.  Then the other two pieces were placed on top of the pieces to cover the toothpicks.  I used hot glue, working on small sections at a time and making sure that all of the pieces were aligned properly.

Today I am in a real time crunch.  I will post more about how the animal becomes three dimensional in the post next week.  

  

Green Man Pumpkin - Part 8 - Something I Forgot in Last Post

 I had planned to start blogging on my other project today, but I realized that I had missed something on the last post.  So, a brief post on that today.  

When I made the mask, I covered the chin area only a short way below the face.  If I had made the mask go all the way to the chin, it would have been more difficult to remove the mask from the face mold.  Undercuts on molds are generally very difficult and may have cause the mask to break.  It could have been repaired easily enough, but why make extra work?  

So, when I attached the face to the pumpkin, there was a gap between the chin and the pumpkin.  I fixed this by using some flexible cardboard cut from a file folder to fill the gap.  (Photos below). The carboard was covered with tape and is now ready for layers of paper mâché with the rest of the pumpkin.  

This photo shows the mask from the underside where there is a significant gap between the pumpkin and the face.

Note that the inside of the face has already been primed and painted prior to attaching to the pumpkin.

Green Man Pumpkin - Part 7 - Face Now Mounted on Pumpkin

 I am adding the photo of the face mounted to the pumpkin first, because I know that is what everyone is waiting to see.    I put a battery-operated light source inside, so you could see the eyes better.

However, there was a lot of prep work before the project got to this point.  I will backtrack so that you can see all of the steps that came between there and the current photo.

In the last blog post I had written about mounting the eyes onto the face.  The next step was to add some eye lids so that the eyes did not have a wide-eyed open stare.  I also reverse painted the areas of hot glue with a thin, translucent coat of white paint to mimic the whites of the eyes.  Painting the glue cuts some of the light that was shining through and gives the eyes a more natural look.  

Before attaching the face, I painted the interior of the pumpkin, the exterior ridge, and the back of the pumpkin's face.  First, I painted the pumpkin's parts with two coats of Gesso.  Then it was painted with two coats of black acrylic paint.  I chose Mars Black.  It dried to a shiny surface which will help reflect light.  Sometimes I paint the insides of pumpkins a metallic gold.  The metallic gold reflects a lot more light than the black.  However, since this pumpkin is planned to be an indoor decoration, and its theme is mostly about the exterior of the face, I chose to go with the less expensive paint.  

This is the photo of the painted interior of the pumpkin. Unfortunately, I forgot to get a picture of the back of the pumpkin's face.  You can see that I also painted the ridge on the exterior of the pumpkin where the face will sit.  This will not be seen when the pumpkin is completed.  It was mainly painted to make sure that even the areas that will not be seen have some coverage to prevent moisture penetration in the future.

After all the black areas were painted and allowed to dry, they all received two coats of an exterior acrylic sealer.  I used a soft brush for that so that I could get into any little nooks and crannies.  This may have been a step that did not need to be taken considering that it will be an indoor project, but I try to build my projects so that they will last a long time.

With everything dry, it was time to add the face.   Before doing anything with glue, I held the face on the pumpkin and made sure that it was on straight and not crooked.  Then I marked some reference lines on the pumpkin and face with a Sharpie marker so that I would be able to get the face back to the same position when adding the glue.

I began mounting the face by putting dots of hot glue at the top, and center sides of the face.  The black exterior ridge acts as a small shelf for the face to sit upon.  I held the three dots of hot glue until they were cool enough to hold the head in place.  As the face is not completely flush with the pumpkin, I added some hot glue to any areas that did not meet the pumpkin to give some added support.  

After the hot glue, I covered the seam between the pumpkin and face with some masking tape.  The seam looked a little rough, so I covered the seam with a small one fourth inch wide piece of cardboard from an old file folder.  The cardboard was covered with another layer of tape.  (Photo below on right.)  

At this point, I am ready to start working on the exterior of the pumpkin.  This is a good stopping point for this segment of the project for this blog post.

Regular reader may remember that I am currently working on two projects at the same time.  I am also working on a carousel with the animal figures made of paper mâché.  To keep from getting stale on either project, I have been switching back and forth between projects.  The next few blog posts will be on making a Ram or some type of mountain goat for the carousel.  After that, I will be back to blogging on the Green Man Pumpkin and showing how I made and attached the leaves.

Check back next week for the new post.