More Work on the Carousel Animals - Part 4 - Manes, Tails, and Furry Coat

 Regular readers know that I have been working on two major projects at once.  I have spent the last few weeks working on my Green Man Pumpkin.  Now I have begun the next phase of the carousel project.  

When I left off working on the Green Man Pumpkin, I was using paper mâché clay to make the leaves.  Not every batch of clay was used up at the end of each day.  Sometimes it was only a pinch of clay and other times I had a partial handful of clay left.  It was not really enough to save, but too much to throw out, so I found a use for it on the Carousel 2025 project.  

Some of my projects are meticulously planned.  Other projects I start with a general concept and then let the idea of the piece evolve over time.  That is what has happened with the Carousel animals.  I had originally thought to just paint the animals but decided that the woolly coat of the ram would be a lot of work to paint it to make it look as I wanted it to look.  I decided to use the paper mâché clay because it would give the animal a rough coat without as much effort.

I started with the Ram's horns.  In a previous post I had mentioned that I thought that the horns felt a little fragile.  The first pinch of clay that I had left over was the gray clay.  I covered the horns, face, ears, and beard with it.  That used up the rest of the gray clay.  I started using the white clay for the body when I had some more clay.   Over the course of a few sculpting sessions, the ram was completely covered.  

For the smaller horse I added a mane and tail with the paper mâché clay.  The mane was easy enough.  I painted the area for the mane with some diluted glue and pressed on the clay.  I used the lead from a mechanical pencil to draw streaks through the clay.  

The tail required a little more work.  On the first day, I made a small post about a quarter of an inch high where I wanted the tail to be.  The area was painted with diluted glue and the clay was added.  I let that dry for a day or two to make sure it was completely dry and well adhered to the horse's rump.  

After that, it was a matter of painting the small post with some more diluted glue and then adding a small roll shaped piece of clay to the post.  I had to make sure that the post was completely covered with the new roll of clay.  The clay was not as cooperative as I would have liked.  The clay was a little moist and wanted to be sliding down onto the rump of the horse.  I used a small roll of aluminum foil under the tail to keep it lifted up.  After that, I drew in some lines on the tail as I did for the mane.  Once the upper part of the tail was dry, it held the shape of the swishing tail.  Then I removed the aluminum foil and allowed the bottom part of the tail to dry.  

I did not want the second horse to look exactly like the first, so I changed up the mane and the position of the tail.  The technique for applying the paper mâché clay was the same as above.

This horse is a little larger and heavier looking than the previous horse.  I would like to portray it as some sort of draft horse.  Although I love Clydesdales, I am thinking about painting this one as a Percheron.  

I remember a Percheron from my childhood years.  His name was Pig.  Someone named him that because he always seemed to be hungry.  He was very smart, he learned how to manipulate the latch on his door and could get out of his stall on his own.  He also figured out how to get the door open where the feed was stored.  One day he broke into the feed room and gorged on the grain.  He was sick for a couple of days after that.  After that it became a daily battle between him and his owners to keep him in his stall until they were ready to let him out.  

Anyway, I am now at the point of starting the next animal.  I am debating which animal I want to make next.  I have two horses and a goat.  One horse will go in each row.  Other animals I have seen on carousels have been dogs, cats, giraffes, tigers, and even ostriches.  I think I will probably do the giraffe next.  That way I will have an even number of hooved animals.  Maybe that will not make any difference one way or another, but it feels as if it needs that symmetry.  

While I had all the animals out, I stood the horses next to each other and the goat behind them just to get an idea of how large a deck I need for the carousel.  Even at one eighth scale, this is going to be a fairly good-sized project.  I will worry about that more once all the animals are completed.

I mentioned to my husband that I was thinking about putting a rotating stand underneath the carousel so it could go round and round.  He said, "If you are going to go to that much effort, I insist that you also make the animals go up and down.  I am not particularly mechanically or electrically savvy, so I might need his help to make that happen.  I will cross that bridge when I get to it.  I suspect that adding that much extra mechanical equipment may mean I have to make the deck even larger to accommodate it.  

Check back next week (Monday or Tuesday) to see the latest update on the carousel project.

Green Man Pumpkin - Part 12 - Finishing the Last leaves on the Back

 In my last blog post I showed that I was working on the vines and leaves on the back of the pumpkin.  These leaves look different from the leaves on the face because they are to represent the pumpkin leaves.  I was about two-thirds of the way through.  This week I finished the pumpkin leaves.

I have been using paper mâché clay to make the leaves.  As I mentioned earlier, I have been working out of two partial bags of the clay mix to complete this project.  I ran out of clay with just one leaf left to make.  That was pretty annoying. I considered raiding my husband's dry wall materials from the basement, but what he had on hand was DAP brand. I have not tried using this, but multiple internet sources say that you should not use DAP brand because it does not work well for paper clay.  

With twenty minutes to go before dinner, I was not enthusiastic about making a trip to the hardware store.  I decided to try to make something from what I had on hand.  I had been using a paper towel to clean the paper mâché clay off of my gloved hands.  The paper towel was pretty well saturated with the product.  So, I ripped the paper towel into miniscule pieces and soaked it in the remains of my diluted glue mix. (60/40 mix of white glue and water).  Then I squeezed out the excess liquid, ripped it up some more, squeezed it again, then mixed it with a bit of undiluted white glue.  I kneaded it until it was thoroughly mixed and the right consistency for clay.  

Once I had this clay mixed, I put it on a leaf and added it too the pumpkin in the usual manner.  (See earlier posts for more details on adding the leaves.)  That leaf is near the top, just left of center.  

The clay was very moist, and it took a long time to dry.  I set it in front of a fan to help it dry faster.  It has been very humid and storming here for days.  I did not want to just let it dry on its own because I was concerned about the leaf molding.  

The clay had a different texture.  Even though I shredded it into the tiniest pieces I could, it was still a little lumpy.  during the drying time I gave it a few presses with my fingers to flatten it out a little.  Because of the texture difference it was not very amenable to my adding the leaf veins in the usual manner.  When I tried to pull the mechanical pencil lead through it, the clay tended to lump up.  After it was about half-way dry, I went in with a different tool and pressed some veins into the clay.  

I had a Plan B, if this had not worked.  My plan was to wait until it was completely dry and giving it a skim coat of modeling paste and drawing the leaf veins through that.  However, it did not come to that.  

The clay is adhering well to the pumpkin.  It has not tried to peel up.  For a makeshift fix, this worked pretty well.  That is what I like about paper mâché; there are so many ways to work with it.  While some ways may work better than others in any given situation, there is always a way to make it work.

This is a good stopping point on this project.  For the next couple of weeks, I will be blogging about my other long-term project: the carousel.   I have added some new details to previous carousel animals and am ready to start a new animal.  After that I will be back to blogging about the next phase of the Green Man Pumpkin.  There will be more on that in the coming weeks.  Check back next week for a new post.

Green Man Pumpkin - Part 11 - Adding Vines and Leaves to Back

 The face of the Green Man Pumpkin is complete.  Now I am working on the back side of the pumpkin.  I wanted to add some vines and pumpkin leaves to the rear of the pumpkin.  Adding vines and leaves accomplishes two things: it breaks up the large expanse of orange, and it adds some weight to counterbalance the weight of all the clay on the face of the pumpkin. I am having some mixed feelings about the results, but overall, I think I like it.

 Before I could put something on the pumpkin I needed to figure out where the vines needed to be placed.  I needed to make sure that there was going to be enough room for the leaves to sit on and between the vines.  In a garden pumpkin vines roll and twist over each other, but that does not necessarily make for a good art composition.  Just putting the paper mâché down was not the best idea as it took a few tries to get something that looked right for the space.      

I started by creating some aluminum foil "vines" by rolling the foil over a wooden skewer.  Then I pulled out the skewer and started twisting the foil to make it as compact as possible.  I experimented with the foil vines until I was happy with the spacing.  I hot glued the foil "vines" to the pumpkin.  I was still working on the vines when I stopped to take a picture.  I added a few more vines after this photo was taken.  

The next part of the experiment was to tape leaves to the vines just to see if this set up was going to work as I hoped.  What I discovered was that my leaves were too big.  While they might have been small in relation to real pumpkin leaves, they were way too large for this project.  I was never that happy with the shape of the leaves anyway.  So, it was back to drawing leaves on cardstock to get a size that worked better.  I am bringing this up because I want people to know that a finished art project is not just a straight path to the finish.  Many times, people look at an art piece and think that it all went perfectly.  It is really not like that.  Art is about reworking what did not work until the artist feels comfortable with how it looks.  Don't quit a project just because at some point in the process it is not working.  

 

Once I figured out the approximate location for the leaves, I started to cover the vines with the paper mâché clay.  I wanted to keep the foil in as an armature to hold up the clay.  The nooks and crannies created by the twisted foil made a good surface for the clay to hold onto.  Although the aluminum foil vines were very narrow, covering them with the clay made them much larger.  This soft clay did not work well for just putting on a thin coat.  The foil kept showing through.  I considered scrapping the idea and removing the vines but ultimately decided that once the leaves were on that it did not look that out of proportion.  

In case you missed the last post about how I applied the leaves, I am adding the information again here.  I drew leaves on cardstock and cut them out.  I would lay a leaf down on my work surface and apply the clay to the back of the leaf to get the shape.  Then I would paint the back of the clay with some white glue that had been diluted.  (This is about a 60/40 mix of glue and water, but I just eyeball it.)  Before applying a leaf to the pumpkin, I also paint the area where the leaf will be placed with some of the diluted glue.  Then I press the leaf into the glue.  Some of the clay will squash out from under the leaf.  I use a sculpting tool to press the clay back under the leaf template.  

After that, I gently lift the cardstock leaf off of the clay and rework the leaf where it has become distorted.  The next step is to use some of the diluted glue to smooth down the face of the leaf.  Once it is fairly smooth, I used a mechanical pencil to carve in some veins on the leaf.  Earlier in the project I found that cutting the leaves in with the sculpting tool I was using caused the veins to separate as it dried and become too wide.  I started using a mechanical pencil with a 0.7 mm pencil lead to carve the veins.  That seemed to work well.      

I am about two thirds of the way through adding leaves to the vines.  At this point it has brought the pumpkin back into balance.  If that still holds after the rest of the leaves are added, I may not have to do anything else to correct the balance.  I guess time will tell.

The pumpkin project is not complete yet.  I plan to have the base of pumpkin surrounded by leaves and maybe some fall fruits.  After I finish with the leaves on the pumpkin, I will be starting on that part of the project.  At least that is the plan for the moment.  I may not like the design afterwards.  I just have to try it and see.

Check back next week for an update on the project.              

Green Man Pumpking - Part 10- Completing the Leaves for the Face

 I have added the third and final layer of leaves to the face of the Green Man pumpkin.  There is still plenty more work to be done on the project, but completing the face is a major milestone.  All in all, there are three layers of leaves on the face. 

                                                                                                         Three layers of leaves added.

As I wrote on the blog last time, I used two different colors of Celluclay.  I had two partial bags of the paper mâché clay, and I planned to use them up on this project.  Two of the layers of the leaves used up the gray clay and the last layer of leaves has almost used up the white clay.

I have started adding some acorns to the face in white clay as well.  I still need to add some more, but I can only do a little at a time because I did not want to mess up the last leaves I added to the face.  

At this point, the pumpkin is slightly over balanced.  I had to prop it up with a pencil to keep it stable while I was working on it today.  I have a plan to fix the balance problem.  Once everything has been added to the pumpkin, I will fix it.  If I try to work on the balance now, it might not be balanced when everything is on the pumpkin. At the end of the project you will not even see where the balance fix was made.

The next part of the project will be to add some vines and leaves around the sides and back of the project.  That should not take but a few days.  I don't plan to get too carried away with the vines.  

This photo shows the pumpkin after the first layer.  

There is another step after the vines and pumpkin leaves.  I will blog more on that in a later post.

At this point in the project, the dull gray of the piece makes it easy to become discouraged.  Looking at it day after day in this dismal color I start to think "This is never going to work."  This is the time to tell myself I just have to have some faith in the process.  I know that once this piece is painted it is going to look so much better.  I also have to remind myself that this project is nowhere near being finished. 

Check back next week for a post showing the vine and pumpkin leaves.