Paper Mâché Carousel Animals - Cat - Part 13

This will be a pretty quick post today because I am pressed for time once again.  It may not have as much detail in the post today, but I will do my best.  

I left off at my last post with bracing one side of the Romance side and the far side with toothpicks.  Once that was done, a second side was added to each body to cover the toothpicks. That left me with two fairly sturdy pieces of body for the cat and the tail.

I did the same thing with the tail.  Since this tail is sticking out from the cat, it will be easier to add the tail to it.  The tiger I made earlier had a tail that wrapped from his rear around to the front leg and required some different handling.

My next task was to turn these flat pieces into something three-dimensional.  This is done by adding some internal supports.  The supports were cut from cardboard.   The supports are different widths to all for some shaping of the various parts of the body.

The supports are hot glued into place.  After taking this picture, I realized that the head support was too wide.  I had to take that out and replace it with a narrower cardboard piece.  I did not add a lot of supports.  I just need it sturdy enough to be able to stand up to the next phase.  (Ignore the Modge Podge.  It has nothing to do with this project, it just happened to be sitting there from when I brought it home for another project.)

The next phase is to add a strip that sits on the back of these supports.  It is a strip of flexible cardboard that I cut from a manilla file folder.  It is hot glued to these supports.  The strip wraps around the body between the legs and continues all the way around the cats.

The cat is perched on a roll of tape.  Because one front leg is higher than the other, it will not stand unaided as the other figures do.  That will not really matter, because the animals will eventually be mounted on poles on the carousel.

This photo shows the strip of manilla folder wrapped around the cat's back.  It continues around the belly of the cat, and up through the ears.  

I cut the strip a little wider than the cat and glue it on with hot glue.  Once everything is glued down, I use a craft knife to trim the edges flush with the sides of the cat.  

And finally, once the cat has been trimmed to my satisfaction, I cover the animal with tape.  Since this is created from card stock and cardboard, I want to make sure that it is well protected from moisture when I start adding the paper mâché paste and strips.

The cat's tail was added once I had covered the entire animal with tape.  I measured to half-way across the rear and marked the spot.  I added a drop of hot glue to the bottom of the tail and held it in place until it was dry.  Then I added a small bead of hot glue to each side of the tail and wrapped it with masking tape while the glue was still warm so that the tail has a good bond.  

Anyway, that is all for the day.  Sorry for any typos or errors.  The day is calling, and I really have to go, so no proofreading this time.

 mâché

Paper Mâché Carousel Animals - Cat - Part 12

I have completed the next step in making the cat figure for my carousel.  I had to make an adjustment on my drawing of the cat.  I had made it smaller so that it would not be as large as the tiger figure I just completed.  But, once I had it cut out, I realized that it was just too small in relation to the other figures.  Rather than go through the task of drawing out the figure in a larger size, I put it on my printer and enlarged it.  Problem solved.  I just thought I would mention it in case anyone noticed the cat looked larger this week.  

This photo is my earlier version of the cat.  

Regular readers will be familiar with this part of the process.  I repeat it with each animal I make because not everyone has seen the older posts and I don't want them to miss a step.  

I have been working with patterns from a book on carving carousel animals, but I change the pattern so that my animals are not exactly like the patterns in the book.  In this case, I changed the shape and angle of the cat's ear and changed the angle of the left leg.  I also changed the left paw of the cat from facing toward the viewer to facing downward.  The animals will also be decorated in a different manner from the patterns when I get to that point.

Once I have a drawing that I am satisfied with, I use carbon paper to transfer the image to a piece of card stock.  I happen to have a large amount of blue card stock, so I have been using that.  Also, the blue card stock contrasts well against the background for taking pictures.

I make two images for each side of the cat.  The side that faces the public is called the Romance side.  This side is generally more highly decorated than the side facing away from the viewer.  

In this photo, the upper two figures are the Romance side, and the lower two figures are the inside.

Once the images are transferred, I cut them out of the card stock with a sharp craft knife. I cut it using the craft knife because I want the silhouette of the animal to be intact.  I have no specific plan for that yet, but I can envision using them as some sort of stencil in a future project.  

Cardstock was also a good choice for this project because the figures are only about five or six inches long and more or less as tall.  Using cardboard would have made the animals bulky, but it could still have been done by reducing the internal width of the supports that will connect the sides.  My philosophy is use what you have, and what I have right now is a lot of blue card stock.

I used scissors to snip off the tail of each piece as the tail goes in the middle of the animal.  I could have used the craft knife.  It is possible to use scissors to cut out the whole thing, but it just feels as if I have more control with the craft knife.  

Card stock is not strong enough by itself to make a three-dimensional animal covered in paper mâché.  The legs are just too flimsy and would not hold up the weight and the neck and body can flex in unanticipated ways.  To deal with this, I reinforce the inside of face of one of the two pieces with wooden toothpicks and hot glue.  I was not interested in taking the time to make it look like a skeleton as these reinforcements will not be seen once the animal is complete.  I just add enough toothpicks to make the figure rigid.  I use scissors to cut pieces off of toothpicks to make small bits to use on areas such as the paws and tail.

Once I have one side reinforced, I cover the toothpicks with hot glue and put the other figure on top of them.  I work a small area at a time, making sure that the two images match up along the edges.  

It is hard to see, but on the picture left, I have labeled the upper cat as "far" to indicate that this is the side that will be facing away from the public.  Romance is listed on the underside of the lower cat.  It helps me keep up with which side I am working with at the moment.  

The next step is to create the internal support pieces that will hold the two sides together to create a three-dimensional cat.  I have done some preliminary work on figuring out how wide the support pieces need to be.  The dimensions vary in different areas of the piece.  I will be blogging more about that in the next blog post.  

Check back next Monday or Tuesday for the next post. 

 

Paper Mâché Carousel Animals - Cat - Part 11

Another busy week, but at least I was able to make some time to work on my carousel project.  I am still working on creating the animals.  This week I started working on the pattern for the cat.  At least the pattern has been transferred to graph paper, and the basic shape of the cat forms have been cut out.  Sometimes even minimal progress has to be counted as a win.

The pattern shows both the Romance side (the side that faces the public) and the far side.  I had to make some adjustments to the pattern on the front legs.  The legs were so close together that I had some concerns about how multiple layers of paper mâché would impact the chest of the cat with the legs being in close proximity.  I raised the leg higher on the far side to give it a little more visual distance between them.  I also needed to make sure I had enough room between the legs to be able to get a paint brush in there to paint.  

In the original pattern, the far side paw was turned outward so that the bottom of the paw's pads could be seen.  I changed it to facing downward.  This would make it easier to paint.  Even though the creature is somewhere between five and six inches long, it is still small when it comes to painting a lot of detail.

I also changed the shape and incline of the ears.  I think it makes the cat look more alert.

In the photo, the far side of the pattern is on the left.  The Romance side is on the right.  The tail is in the upper middle between the body patterns.  Obviously, the tail goes in the middle of the rump, so you could not have the pattern of it on each side of the piece.

Anyway, the next step is to turn it into a three-dimensional object.  Regular readers have seen this method in previous posts.  I will be showing it again in the next post.  I know it is repetitive when I am doing multiple animals, but not everyone is a regular reader.  

After the cat is completed, I only need to make one more animal.  I am going back and forth as to what I want to do for the next animal.  I have made two horses, one ram, and a tiger.  So, three animals with hooves and two felines once the cat is complete.  I am debating whether I want to do some other type of goat, a gazelle, or a lion.  The jury is still out on that, but I am leaning towards another goat type creature just for consistency of size and shape in the animals.  However, most carousels with multiple animal types do not generally have the same type of animals in each row, so I am conflicted about what to do.  I also have reconsidered the giraffe pattern that I made earlier.  It is too tall, and I will have to raise the overall height of the project if I use it.   I am not sure I want to do that.  It is a matter of having the space to display it once the project is finished.

Once the animals are finished, the decorating fun begins.  I have already purchased what I need to make the clay that will be used to make the saddles, flowers, and other decorations.  I am looking forward to getting to that part of the project.  Because I have to mix up batches of clay, I may be working on multiple animals at once.  The internet says you can keep clay in the refrigerator for a few days, but my experience with that has not been a good one.  

As regular readers know, I recently completed my Green Man Pumpkin project.  For the next few weeks, I want to put a lot of time into this project.  I probably will not pick up a second project until after Thanksgiving.  With the holidays coming on I will not have the time to add another project.  I do have one unfinished doll project that has been sitting for a long time.  I may post an update on that project from time to time between now and then.  

The reason I have been going back and forth between projects is to keep myself from becoming bored with the project.  By having a break between one animal and the next, it breaks up the monotony for the readers too.  Many people do not want to take on a long-term project because it does not have as much instant gratification as a quick project.  It takes a lot of patience and perseverance to stay on task for months at a time.  Having a second project going has helped keep me from just putting it aside and saying I cannot take any more of this. 

Check back next week on Monday or Tuesday for the next update on this project.

My Earlier Carousel Project - A Retrospective

 I know a lot of people were expecting a new update on the carousel today.  I have been out of town and did not have an opportunity to work on it.  And, in the run up to going out of town we had heating/air conditioning issues as well as having to have some large and dangerous trees taken down, I was pretty distracted.  So, with no progress on the current carousel, I thought I would put up some pictures of my previous carousel.

It is hard to believe it, but it has been twelve years since I made this carousel.  The animals on it are a giraffe, a cat, a pig, and a camel.  Each of the four sides of the central pillar has a face.  

The faces are Johnny Cake faces.  When I was growing up, my mother had a Johnny Cake face from an antique carousel on the wall in the kitchen.  

The Johnny Cake story is an old English tale.  It is very similar to the story of the Ginger Bread Man story.  In this case a pancake was being cooked.  It jumps out of the pan and starts to roll away.  It is subsequently chased by a number of characters.  This story was one of my youngest child's favorite stories.  We read it often when he was little.                  

The cat.

Each side of the central pillar also has a small mirror.  When I was a child, I rode on a Merry Go Round at the amusement park that was at Virginia Beach.  It had mirrored columns on its pillar, and you could watch yourself and the horses surging forward and going up and down.

The armature for these animals was made from wire and covered with paper mâché. The armature photo for the cat is one of my most viewed photos.

The pig.

The rods holding up the animals are brass.  They are topped with a brass cap.  

This carousel did not go up and down, but it did go around.  It was not motorized, but it was mounted on a Lazy Susan type base.  You had to manually give it a push to make it move.  

The camel.

The floor of the carousel was made from wooden craft sticks.  It was stained to make it look like the real wooden floor of a carousel.

Even back then, I knew that at some point I wanted to make a larger motorized carousel.  It just took me a while to get to it.  I always felt I could have done better.  

I generally have way too many project ideas, and very little time to work on them.  Every once in a while, I hit a slump but that usually means that something is going on that prevents me from getting to my craft work.  

So, I will be home this week, and I hope that I will have some time to get to work on my current carousel project.  I will be posting new photos next week on Monday or Tuesday.  I am getting ready to work on my next animal, which will be a cat.  

After the cat form is completed, I still have one more animal to make.  I am still trying to figure out which animal I want it to be.  Once that animal is complete, I will be on to drilling a hole for the post, sanding and painting.  

I am becoming antsy on finishing this project.  I have had some new ideas that I can hardly wait to get started on.  So many projects, so little time.