almost there!!

The last couple of days have been slow. Work is taking over my life so i dont have much time for my model making. ARGH! But, i have now cast the last leg, filled any air bubbles from rushing the process, patched up the socks and shoes. All i need to do now it clean up the seam lines from the casting process, add a bit of coloured silicone to areas that have defects i.e. the top of the socks might have some of the leg coloured silicone on them. Its a bitch to get silicone off silicone so i have just been cutting it away and patching it up later. Works quite well.

So here are a few shots of the 'Boy'. 

My white spray paint has arrived now so i can spray the faces and get them coloured as well. I also need to get this little guy clothed, thats going to be tricky, i am not the best sewing and never made clothes at this scale before.

trees continued

Woo! today i have been doing a bit of everything! I am loving it at the moment, i have started so many little things so when i'm waiting for things to dry or set, i can carry on with something else.

My spray paint arrived yesterday so when waiting for my legs to dry i thought i would spray my trees.

I started off with base spraying the foam with white spray paint, turned out a 400ml can just about did 5 trees and a few smaller trees. Going to need to buy some more i thinks, this oasis foam is so absorbent it looked like i hadn't even sprayed it. So, a good few coats were needed but i soon got the green spray on. I wanted a spiral effect on the tree so i started off by spraying a lawn green colour first. After a few coats of that colour, i wrapped masking tape around the foam in a spiral starting from the bottom to the top. 

And heres a finished tree top. I am really happy with the way it has turned out, i think the rest will look awesome and this design will really help with the aesthetics of the film.

its coming along

I thought i would put the puppet back together and see how it all looks so far. At this stage i have only done one sock, i now actually have a shoe done but i will post that up when the whole leg is finished.

A little bit of padding.

A bit more and some shorts.

Ooo, a little pose. When i have the legs and shoes all cast in silicone i will put them back on the armature and start making some clothes for this little guy. I cant wait to start animating him!

socks

This is a really quick update before i go to work. These pics are of the socks that i had to cast second on top of the leg. They may need neatening up but basically the next stage will be to cast the shoes in black silicone, not sure if im going to do the laces in a different colour or not, may be to tricky.  

treeeesss!

I have now made a start on the set and some props that will create the scenery. I think i have started most things now, oh well, it keeps me moving. This post is about the trees. I was thinking hard about how i want the set to look, i would of loved to create something with as much detail as something like Aardman's Pirates for example, but i thought that doesn't really go with the theme of the story and will make the characters look out of place. So, i thought round shapes or curved lines and bright colours, simple but effective. Below are a few quick drawings i did of some trees and how i thought they should look.

With some ideas down on paper, (or in this case, on the screen) i found it much easier to visualise how i want the trees to be. The next problem was, how am i going to make them? They need to be fairly big which creates a problem for the weight of them, i could of sculpted them and then made moulds and cast them in plastic but due to the size i decided not to go with that idea. With the help from my girlfriends recent activity in making cake pops, i stumbled upon oasis. This stuff is usually used for arranging flowers. I bought a dense block which i can only describe as a softer and maybe slightly crumblier version of styrofoam. This oasis though is very easy to carve and very lightweight.

The pic below is not a great image but basically i have carefully, using a range of different scalpels, carved away at the block. This does leave some fairly strong lines where the chunks have come out. 

But because oasis is soft its very easy to sand down the a nice smooth finish, obviously its not going to be a shiny surface but it has a great texture and i think will work great as a tree.

To mix things up i also bout some round balls made from the same oasis stuff. With these i have joined two together using a cocktail stick covered in superglue. These will be round trees.

To make the trunk i sculpted plastiline onto a bamboo stick and added some texture to act a bark. Again its not the best image, but basically the bamboo sticking out the top of the sculpt will be pushed inside the oasis tree and the sculpted part of the trunk will act as a stopper, so the trunk can only go in so far. I then made a mould of the trunk by putting it inside a cardboard tube and pouring in thick moulding silicone.

These are the trunks cast in plastic ready to be trimmed and painted.

new silicone

OK so i had a little break on the legs, i wasn't feeling it and wasn't happy with how they were coming out. I didn't want to waste anymore materials on making a new mould either.

I decided the mould looked fine, it could do the job for now anyways. I went back to looking for a new silicone product, what i found is really frustrating. If only i had bought this product first, everything would have been all sunshine and daisies. Anyways, i bought a silicone called dragon skin, i had seen it before but i think because of its viscosity i was detoured. I cast the legs the other night and mixed in some of my pigment and the legs came out wonderfully. Bellow are some pics of these legs.

I only wanted the legs to be casted because the boy will be wearing socks and shoes. I had to try bung up the bottom of the legs around the ankles, this stopped the silicon from flowing into the shoes. This can be seen on the pic below, the grey plastiline in the mould.

And this is how they came out. i am really impressed with the dragon skin silicone, it looks really solid almost and is not soft and squishy like the Eco flex silicone i used to use.

I have the socks being moulded at the moment so when they are dry i will pop the legs back in the mould and hope this process works. Ill get some pics done and post them up when i can.

legs re-moulded

my other pair of legs that i sculpted went a bit wrong when i came to moulding them, so i made some more.

second time around, i think they are a bit better than the last ones.

tried a different type of clay too, terracotta, it smooths a lot easier than the grey clay.

the mould just needs to be cleaned up, i will do a test cast to make sure it works.

quick update

this is just a really short update but ill do more tomorrow, i hope. i have found that the face parts don't feel to secure when they're on the head, so i added a couple of extra magnets onto the core.

to make the magnets effective i had to add steel tacks into the face part so they line up with the positioning of the magnets. i can confirm that this works and i can now hold the head upside down in confidence.

sculpting the legs

for a couple of days i have been sculpting the legs, i have been using medium hardness plastiline, much better that plasticine. bellow you can see the legs.

nobly knees

bellow i have started sculpting the shoes. i started off with the socks, the idea i had was to make quite big shoes and skinny legs.

getting some form to the shoes

i made sure i made everything in pairs so each shoe should be roughly the same.

adding more shape and padding out the shoe

bellow i have added the tongue and a bit of trimming to go around the tongue.

finally i added soles and some more trimming to connect the soles and some shoelaces!

starting to create the mould.