Head and Body Part 1

So yeah you may see from the title it says part 1, thats because the head and body have been hard work to do! Mainly the head, but you'll soon find out the problems I've had. 

But you know what they say, mistakes are good! 

So stay positive! Even if you're going mad inside!

Lets start with the head!

As you know, I have made a balsa inner core to keep the head light, if not, 'bulking out' page here:

http://thomasvaughananimation.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/bulking-out-body.html

so with that, I started covering the head with Premo clay, this was my first time using this, and I decided to use it as it comes in a variety of colours, plus it can be baked and hardened in the oven!

A mixture of different colours were used to achieve the colour I wanted.

After getting relatively bored mixing more and more pieces of premo I started to drift off subject and ended up with a pretty cool camouflaged slug!  

Just thought I'd share that photo with you!

I then got back on topic and started mixing again.

This was the final result. The colour kept whilst baking, which was good. I would now have to mix the same colour green to place on the head for an eyebrow, to enable me to animate it.

 But yeah, the head was sculpted, it was green, that was that, finished........

Is what I wished had happened

As you can see from the images of the head above there are cracks and dents, and the whole thing is very uneven, which got me rather annoyed as this is not the standard I wanted in my work...

Therefore I knew I now needed to find a way of improving the head to a standard I wanted!
But before that I decided to move on to the shape of the body, as I now have a rough scale of the head.

Beginning the Body!!






I began by wrapping the balsa in cling film (saran wrap, if your not from the UK), this was to make things easier for me in the long run.

As after sculpting the bodyand making a mould, the clay would then need to removed from the inner core. Applying cling film to the balsa will enable me to remove the clay quickly and cleanly without damaging the sculpt.








Once wrapped, sculpey firm was added to the core.

Clay kept being added to the balsa, and then the head was placed on top. I then took a loop tool and began shaving away any excess sculpey, and started defining the shape.


After shaving the sculpey I was left with a rough shape of Blob's body.



And from the shreds of his body grew some nicely shaped eyes.
That's enough for the time being, more on head and body next time!

Legs & Crocs!

My next step was sculpting the legs and crocs. First I started with the legs.

I knew I was going to sculpt a very simple design for the legs, being thick towards the top and thin at the bottom, and generally smooth.

Also as I'm casting the leg separate to the crocs, I can recast the same leg, therefore only one leg needs to be sculpted.

The top of the legs is angled upwards on one side, but rotating the leg in the opposite direction will create the left leg, as there's no markings on the sculpt to determine which leg is which! 

Finished leg sculpt

Once the leg had been finished, I checked to see that it still fit into the K+S of the croc and how it looked. Once I was happy I then made a start on the crocs!

I thought I would try to sculpt the feet simultaneously to ensure when I make an alteration on one foot, I would then do the same on the other, to try and ensure they look very similar.

       

  

The bands of the crocs were easily made using a sculpting tool. I began by rolling out a a thin pice of sculpey, I then took the gripped/textured side of my sculpting tool and rolled it on the sculpey to create an imprint.  Once I had the textured, I wrapped it around the croc.  

Finished crocs..... or so I thought!

Once I had the two side by side, I could clearly see they were not the same. 

My initial plan was to have identical crocs with, one left, one right. But the two crocs ended up looking quite different to one another, with one looking more flat.

But when considering the amount that was needed to get right:

- The overall size of the croc

-The thickness in sole

- The thickness in the textured band

- The holes

-The curvature of the croc

I then realised that would be a major task to get right in a space of a couple of days!

I then had a decision to make, to try and reshape the shoe and get it similar or, rip the thing up!

...........

I ripped the thing up!

   

Considering the amount of skill, time and detail that was needed to sculpt an identical left and right shoe, I did not have the time at this point to retry it. Therefore I decided to tear the clay off one armature, and re-sculpt a croc which would be generic i.e neither left or right footed. This meant I would be able to use the one croc as both feet, when moulded and casted.

Here's how the finished croc looked!

Now let's go do the head and body!

                       

Time to Sculpt Hands!

It's time to sculpt! Although ... as I've decided he will be made of entirely silicone, that means I will need to sculpt his whole body!

......

This is going to take a very very long time!

So, to begin. 

I started with the hands, no specific reason, I just started with that. I have decided to sculpt with super sculpey firm. The benefits of using this is due to...
...well...
 it's firm, hence the name.
With a firm/hard clay it allows me to handle the clay relatively rough, i could be holding part of the sculpted clay and be relatively confident that i will not reshape the sculpt. Also with the firmness, it allows minor detail to be sculpted easily in to the clay.

The main tools I use are the 4 in the top image, there are 2 flat head metal tools that I use to smooth and shape the clay. I have a loop tool to easily remove small amounts off the sculpt if needs be. And also i have a playing dart  to be able to get in between the fingers and also to add detail to the palm.

Before sculpting I put a dab of epoxy glue, just a little bit, on the tips of the fingers this is to ensure that the tips of the fingers are smooth and rounded, so when the hand is cast in silicone I will not have to worry about the wire in the fingers or the hard tips of the heat shrink ripping through the silicone.

I didn't take any photos mid sculpt,

Once I get sculpting I just forget about these things! But here are photos of the final hands all sculpted.

wooooo!

Bulking out the body!

For the next part of making my puppet, I needed to bulk him out.
I have decided to bulk my character out with balsa wood. The reason for this is that it it easy to cut and shape by sanding, and also it is extremely light!
I began by taking balsa scraps and glueing them together using epoxy glue, clamping them together to ensure they adhere to each other securely.

Once this was done I then took my two halves, places my armature piece in the middle and epoxied this together.

The next step was for me to sand the balsa in to the correct shape, I began by using a dremel to remove big pieces and to get the basic shape quickly. I then moved on to sand paper to get the smooth shape I wanted.

A piece of advice I can give..... 'Do not sand balsa (especially with a dremel!) in a room where you sleep!.... or even where you live! 

If you don't follow that rule. You will be coughing up sawdust for a good few days! 

The idea of the hoover taped to the table only sprung to mind during the end, and even this didn't manage to suck in all of the shavings!

So please sand in a space that is provided for those sorts of things,  if a space is not available then  venture outside to sand, otherwise say hello to acting like this....

I then went in to uni to finish off the rest of the bulking out for his head.
As sawdust was filling my room at this point.
As you can see I have left space for the eyebrow paddles to be easily removed and be changed in the head core.



However.........

After speaking to Martin (My lecturer) he agreed with me that if I did make the head out of silicone and the eyebrow paddles snapped, that would mean removing the silicone from the head and recasting it when the new paddles were put in. This would mean so much time spent on such a small problem! Therefore we decided to scrap this idea and for me to sculpt the head out of sculpey and to then have a plasticine eyebrow on top!

In the end my armature went to plan, and was how I wanted it, based on the armature sheet!

Minus the eyebrow paddles!

 

Foot Armature

I thought I would do a post of how I made the armature for his feet. After taking some amazing information from Josh and Nathan Flynn's blog, which you can find here...

http://joshua-flynn.blogspot.co.uk/

http://nathan-flynn.blogspot.co.uk/

I then began building the armature!

I began my cutting 2 foot shapes out of a steel sheet, once i had the shapes I then cut about 1/3 way down from the toes, which would enable the front and the back of the foot to be separate. K+S was then glued with epoxy to the steel, which would enable wire to run through them to allow me to animate them.

I Also drilled holes in the front of the foot to allow a nut to be glued there for the use of tie downs. 

The good thing about using the steel foot would be that I am not restricted to using the tie down method. As steel is magnetic it would allow me to keep my puppet secure with magnets under my stage, eliminating the worry of having to drill in to my stage and causing a right mess!

Which I don't really need!  

Constructed foot with wire and heat shrink! 

Let's Build an Armature!

The re design of Blob has finished. Now for the build! 

I began by doing an armature sheet on Photoshop to help me with my build. This allowed me to print it out and measure all my materials up against it. 

My plan is to make the arms, legs and feet replaceable just incase wire snaps within them or the silicone tears!  

On to building!  I cleared a space to build on my desk, printed the armature sheet out and began!

 

.......

After A LOT sawing and twisting wire the armature was done! 

 

Soo, a lot of things has gone on here that may have slipped my mind to document with photos.

Whoops!

But il try and clarify what I've done! After all K+S brass square pieces were cut to length and wire twisted I began by covering the wire in heat shrink wrap! which I do have a picture of, well done to me on that! 

As you can see from the heat shrink above,  it secure's very tight around the wire. The wire closest to camera shows half of the heat shrink heated to the wire and the other half in it's original state :)

Heat shrink is used to give added protection and longevity to the wire as wire will eventually snap! 

After this was done i began glueing the wire in to the correct K+S pieces with epoxy glue. Miliput (the yellow stuff) was used to block the ends of K+S peaces to ensure once the smaller K+S was inside that they then didn't pop out the other end. Also the miliput was used as and extra adhesive to secure the K+S pieces to the metal sheet. 

You may wonder what the funny looking antenna pieces are, on top of his head. These will be eyebrow paddles, once the armature is cast in silicone, in theory, the eyebrow will be animatable.

Emphasis on 'In theory'! 

Where To Start?

I was all ready to begin. I had my original character and sound clip at hand, and it was time to start drawing......

But then I started to think... My characters a Blob! How am I going to build this in to a puppet for stop motion? What's he going to be made of? How's he going to move? And then .... 

So I began drawing some blobby characters :)

After the development I came to a decision of how I wanted him to look!

So you might be thinking 'Why has he got a scarf?'... but if your not.... I'm still going to tell you why he's got one.

When seeing the final design, I thought to myself,

 'What a nightmare he's going to be to clay up and mould' 

 (F.Y.I. I decided that I wanted him made of entirely silicone!)

Therefore to make things easier for me at a later stage, I thought I would separate the head and body in to 2 different sections and mould them separately! 

But why the scarf? 

The scarf would be used to hide the seam line, of where the head and body met! Very similar to how Aardman did their chickens on 'Chicken Run'! Genius!