Paper Mâché Carousel Animals - Tiger - Part 8

I am still working on the tiger for my carousel.  I had hoped to have the cotton clay layer added before this post, but that did not work out.  Unseasonably cool temperatures allowed my husband and I to get some work done we had been putting off because it was just too hot and humid.  So only a small step forward on this project.

Two layers of standard strip paper mâché have been added to the tiger.  I wanted to have some extra layers of protection for the figure before adding the cotton clay.  That clay will be moist for about twenty-four hours.  I did not want it to soften the cardstock and cause the animal shape to sag or collapse.

Right now, the animal almost looks like a bear more than a tiger.  It will look different after the tail is added.  The face still needs a little work also.  The front of the face looks a little flat.  I plan to work on that when I add the clay.

I had figures collapse on a project once years ago.  I was making some fairly tall figures that I wanted to paint for a Christmas scene.  My paste was too moist, and it permeated the tape and made the underlying cardboard soggy.  Over the course of a few hours, I kept hearing thuds coming from my studio as one by one the figures collapsed and fell from the worktable to the floor.  It was pretty disheartening.  I never did get back to that project. 

Anyway, today I plan to try to work with the cotton clay.  I have spent a couple of hours tearing cotton balls into small shreds of cotton this past week.  With twenty-twenty hindsight, I will say that I probably should have been wearing a mask while I did this.  Little fluffs of cotton kept flying up to my face.  Keeping a lint roller handy would be helpful as well.  I was covered with little strands of cotton by the time I was finished.

I found the recipe for cotton clay on the internet.  It calls for boiling the cotton with flour and water.  I keep an old pot that I don't use for food for these types of projects.  I am really not thrilled with the whole boiling and waiting for it to cool thing.  I once did a project where I had to boil some wool.  It really stank.  Cotton may not do the same thing, but I want to try something else first. 

Boiling the cotton may cause the fibers to open up more to accept the paper mâché mixture better and make the clay a more cohesive clay, but I am not sure that it is totally necessary.  I have some paper mâché clay recipes that called for boiling the paper first but really worked just as well by soaking the paper over night.

I think I would prefer to just soak cotton until it is damp and then squeeze any excess moisture out of it. Then mix it with flour, water, and diluted glue.  I may try that first to see if it works.  

So that is about it for today.  I will be blogging next week on what happened with the cotton clay.  The worst that could happen is I have to start over on the tiger or the clay (or both).

Check back next week (Monday or Tuesday) for the next blog post.

Paper Mâché Carousel Animals - Part 7 - Tiger Build Continues

I am still working on creating the paper mâché tiger.  It was a busy week for me, and I did not have a lot of time to work on it.  However, any progress is better than no progress. Besides being busy, I was distracted while I was working on it and made a mistake or two.  Fortunately, it was one that could be recovered from as I continue to work on the animal.

Bad crafting days, everyone has one at some point.  Whether it is catching up thread or fabric under a sewing machine foot, having to pull out some rows of knitting because of misreading the pattern, or making a bad cut on a piece of wood; sooner or later any crafter is going to make a mistake.  This week was my turn.  I bring this up because I want people to know it happens and that not every project goes perfectly from start to finish.  It is easy to become discouraged when things do not go well.  

Many people have what are referred to as UFOs.  No not flying saucers, it stands for Unfinished Objects. It is not uncommon for people to have incomplete craft projects hanging around because of some problem that caused them to become discouraged.  I used to have those too, but as I became a little better at the crafts, I made the decision that I would no longer leave a craft project unfinished.  I will complete the project even if it is never going to meet my expectations.  Most of the time it comes out better than I thought it would.  

Once you make a mistake you have to decide whether that piece of the project is ruined beyond fixing and you need to start over or if you can come up with a solution to fix the problem.  Sometimes the fix may take your craft item in a completely different direction from what you envisioned.  You will be surprised at what you can come up with to fix a problem

Last week I stopped working after drawing the images of the Romance side (The side that faces outwards.) and the inward facing side. I also transferred the images to some cardstock by tracing over the images with carbon paper underneath the drawing.  Then I cut them out using a sharp craft knife.  All seemed well at the time.  It was not until later that I discovered a problem with the drawing, but that was not the worst of the mistake on this animal.  There were a couple of mistakes.

The first error was that when I returned to work on the animal I did not stop to think through where I was on the project.  My next step in creating the three-dimensional figure is that I stiffen the blue cardstock by gluing toothpicks on the inside of the animal to give it a "skeleton".  It is not an actual skeleton, just toothpicks glued on where needed to make it sturdy.  

In my defense, I will add that not only was I distracted by other things going on, but I was also in brain fog because I had spent the morning converting the American units of measure to centimeters and millimeters while determining the lengths for the internal cross piece supports.  It was easier for me to work with the metric system as my rulers are difficult to read when looking at 16ths and 32nds of an inch.  

I neglected to take a photo of the cross pieces and the strips of folder that covered the top and bottom of the animal.  If you would like to see the full explanation as to how these were installed, you can scroll back to my carousel horse or goat blog posts to see that part of the process.  If you are not able to see them, you can look at them by going to my blog IRL: folkartbycaroljones.blogspot.com.  I am adding a photo of the horse cross pieces here for quick reference.

Anyway, long story short, I cut the cross-pieces out to my converted lengths and started to glue them on.  When I finished gluing them on, I held the animal up and thought, "Why is this animal so flimsy compared to the others?"  That was when I realized that I had glued in the cross pieces before I had added the toothpick skeleton.  My choices at this point were either to undo the work that had already been done, or I could glue the skeleton to the outside before I covered the animal with tape.  In this case, I chose to glue the toothpicks to the outside.  As you could see from the top photo, they are quite visible at this point.  However, when the animal is completed, they will not be visible because I plan to cover the animal with a layer of homemade clay.  More on the clay in a moment.

So, on to the second mistake.  Apparently, my interpretation of the tiger pattern was not exactly right.  (The size of the tiger pattern was large compared to the horses, and I needed to make a reduced pattern) I made the legs on one side were too short.  I did not discover this until I had the animal skeleton on, and the piece was all taped up.  The tiger had a distinct lean to the left when it was stood up on its four legs.  It was not a lot too short, only about a millimeter or two, but it was very noticeable.  I suppose in the overall scheme of things it might not have been noticeable when the animal is put on its poll on the carousel, as I could have compensated for that, but I knew it was there.  It was just unacceptable to me.  Fortunately, I was able to rectify the situation by hot gluing on some small bits of toothpick to the bottom of the feet and then covering it with masking tape.  Once the tiger is covered with layers of paper mâché strips and clay, no one will ever know it was a problem.  The tiger now stands well balanced on its feet.

This week I will be working on covering the tiger with clay.  I have run out of the commercial paper mâché clay that I had been using for the other animals.  I wanted the tiger to look as if it had fur, so I plan to make some homemade cotton ball clay.  I have not made this before, although I had previously made some clay out of dryer lint for another project.  I have high hopes that this clay will work well in this application.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.  I will let you know how it works out in my next blog post.

Check back next Monday or Tuesday for the next blog post.

Paper Mâché Carousel Animals - Part 6 - Tiger

Last week I was blogging on making the giraffe and about I was having trouble with its size.  I worked on it for a while and finally came to the conclusion that it was just going to be too large for this project.  I really could not even make the case for it being a baby giraffe.  Its height was going to create a problem with how high the roof of the carousel would have to be to accommodate it.  I finally decided that it was not right for this project.  

I changed plans and decided to work on a tiger instead.  I am finding that my reference material is giving me a problem.  It also seems to be much larger than it should be.  I am coming to the conclusion that the diagrams in the book may not be on scale to each other.  A tiger is big, but it should not be bigger than a horse.  So, I had to reduce the scale a little bit. 

I am still not sure I have gotten it right. This is my second attempt at getting it to the size I need it to be.  It has taken me most of the week to work on that part.  I also changed the mouth on the animal from open to closed.  This size is just too small to try to make paper mâché teeth.

I am not the greatest at math, and the math for reducing this was a bit mind boggling.  It was easier to reduce the size by switching to the metric system.  I used online conversion tables to convert inches to millimeters.  It was easier to divide using tens instead of eighths and sixteenths.  Then I had to convert the reduced number back to inches to be able to get it onto the graph paper which is in quarter inch squares that have been marked off into one-inch squares.  I think I might still be having some brain fog.

Once I had something I thought I could live with I transferred to drawing to the blue cardstock I am using for the foundation of the figures.  

There are still a few differences I have to work through to get the figures to match up a little better.  

I have just started cutting out the cardboard bracing pieces that I will use to attach the two sides of the figure together.  I will have more on how the three-dimensional figure is put together in my next blog post.  Check back next week (Monday or Tuesday) for the update.

Paper Mâché Carousel Animals - Part 5 - Giraffe

This week has been pretty busy for me, and the weather has been so nice out that I did not spend a lot of time working on my Carousel project.  I did manage to get the silhouette of the giraffe drawn, transferred to the cardstock and cut out.  

The drawings are a little dim, I guess I should have been closer when I took this photo.  Maybe it is hard to see in this picture, but the hind leg on one side is about 3/16th of an inch (about 0.92 mm if I did the math right) narrower than the other hind leg.

I did not realize that there was that much of a difference until after I cut out the silhouette and compared one to the other.  There is a little bit of a discrepancy in the belly area as well.  However, the differences are small, and I think I will be able to make them up when I start adding the paper mâché strips to the figure.  I decided not to redraw the animal.  Sometimes trying to correct just ends up making things worse.

The giraffe was a challenge because of its size.  I had planned to do all the animals at 1/8 scale.  The giraffe was so large that I had to reduce the size.  It was going to be so tall that it would cause the entire roof of the carousel to be higher.  I had to reduce its size a little bit to keep the whole piece from being something that was larger than would look well in most homes.  This is going to be a big project.

These animals are really the same size; I just did not place them well for the picture.  

So long story short, now that I have reduced the size of the animal, it looks out of proportion to the other animals.  

I have not decided yet whether or not to proceed with the giraffe and just let it be small, or to discard the giraffe for a different animal.  I will be thinking about that this week.  

Check back next week (Monday or Tuesday) for a new post on the carousel animals.

 

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.