Owl perch and wand holder

This isn't the sort of thing that I normally post about, but I have historically shown a few crafty things I've made, so I thought I'd show this.

 



My daughter is a huge Harry Potter fan (ok, my wife and I are too) and last year we went to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Florida. She came home with a ton of merchandise. I immediately started thinking about neat ways to display some of it, rather than just shoving it in her closet. It took about a year, but this year for her birthday I finally made her this combination owl perch and wand holder. I wanted it to look like something that might be standard issue in a Hogwarts dormitory, so I stained it red and added a gold medallion and G for Gryffindor. My initial plans called for much more distressing and even fake owl poop to really make it look old and worn. But for time's sake, and making sure it would be something that a little girl would like, I kept the final one nice and clean. Also, the little ramikan was just something I put on there for the picture. I did want to have a worn clay dish or something either filled with birdseed or little mouse bones, for the owl to nibble on, but again, budget and time won out.

How to make a Daniel Radcliffe Puppet

I have something a bit different for you today: my daughter had to do a biography report on someone, and she chose Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who plays Harry Potter on film. Here's a shot of old Danny boy.

Aside from the written report, she also chose to make a puppet of Daniel. Being her loving father, I agreed to lend her some guidance in the matter. I googled various types of simple puppets and found something I thought would work at this href="http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~wwwsfa/library_howto_rodpuppets.htm">link, though I made some significant deviations along the way. We made a trip to our local craft store and picked up just about everything we would need. I don't remember the total amount but it came in under $20.

My daughter insisted that this had to be Daniel Radcliffe, not Harry Potter (that would have been far too simple), so the felt shown above was chosen with the wardrobe of a well dressed contemporary teen in mind.

Anyway, the very first step (not shown) was to take an empty water bottle, and cut off the neck. I did this with a sharp X-acto knife, and sanded the edges a bit just to make sure they weren't sharp. The bottle will act as the puppets torso. The upper slope of the bottle forms pretty good shoulders, and the hole where the bottle neck was, will allow your control rod, which is the puppet's neck, to come through. The next step is to add the arms. I deviated from the website plans slightly- their arms were linked pieces of wood. Since Daniel is going to have a coat on, I decided to make our arms out of string bulked up with a bit of Crayola Model Magic, an air drying modeling compound (we used it for many parts). I cut 2 small holes (again, an X-acto knife does this easily) where I wanted each of the shoulders to be, one below the other, and through these holes tied the string which I had made extra long (you can always cut it down later). The bulking up of the arms will come later, but below you can see one of the strings tied at the shoulder.

I had precut a wooden dowel to a length that allowed it to come out of the top of the bottle and still gave my daugther a good length to hold onto beneath the bottle. The operater's hand is supposed to control it from beneath the bottle, not necessarily inside the bottle so if you do this yourself make sure you make the dowel long enough. Aside from the head on top, we also needed something inside, to keep the dowel from extending too far up and making Dan look like a giraffe. The plans suggested a wooden ball, drilled with a hole to fit your dowel and glued in place. I didn't have either a ball that big or a drill bit that large, so I opted for another ball of model magic, what we also made the head out of. This was our biggest mistake and had to be fixed the next day. Model Magic takes a long time to cure, and more so if you keep moving it. Our constant movement of the puppet during the process didn't allow the ball inside to dry, in fact it slowly moved the ball down the dowel, leaving a coating of Model Magic in it's path, so that eventually Daniel had a long wrinkly neck. Though it's not shown in these pictures, we ended up removing the inside ball the next day, and creating a stopper from leftover felt. It was tricky to get onto the dowel and I won't bore you with those details, but if you do this yourself, I advise try something other than model magic for this inner stopper. This step is best handled here at the beginning and doing it after the fact could risk your puppet's head.

Anyway, below you can see the basic head, and that early, doomed, inner ball. Oh yeah, and the string arms.

We covered the dowel between with more model magic (we used a lot of white Model Magic (MM) and just a bit of orange for that skin color). My daughter put on all the facial features (we had some blue MM leftover from a previous project for those eyes).

Next my daughter added some rolls of MM to the arms, just to give them some bulk. We were sure to leave bare string at the places we wanted to have the arms jointed (shoulder, elbow and wrist). Again, this probably wasn't the best way- the puppet arms might not last as long as they would had we used wood, but it was much quicker.

Next it was time to make him some clothes. We made him an orange shirt by simply hot gluing orange felt across his front (did I mention we also put MM around the bottle where his chest would show above the collar?). Remember the whole shirt wouldn't be unecessary because we were going to put a jacked over it, so only this front part needs to show. I don't sew at all but my daughter was able to stitch some tubes of felt together for jacket sleeves.

We slipped these on the arms (conveniently hiding that they were just strings) and glued the shoulder of the sleeve into place. There are all sorts of folds and extra fabric that would probably make a seamstress crazy, but we were careful that allof this will be pretty well hidden when it's all done.

We then wrapped the whole lower part of the body with a blue felt, approximately the color of denim. I also found a cheap watch band to serve as belt. It wasn't long enough to wrap around his whole body, but it would only show in the front. We hot glued it in place and then glued small strips of blue felt into place where the belt loops would be. I think it's little details like the belt especially when made of dissimilar materials from the rest of the puppet that make it feel more high quality. It doesn't have to be something expensive, but it helps hide the technique better, and someone can't simply look at it and say how it was done.

We couldn't find any brown fur at our craft store, so we had to settle for black. Through trial and error we were able to cut 3 pieces to fit on Dan's head. Be sure to cut fur like this from the back with an X-Acto knife. This allows you to cut the fabric, without trimming the hair on it. That way the hair stays nice and shaggy and hides whatever seams you create. Aside from his hair, you can see Dan's long wrinkly neck below, because that inner ball of MM was being pushed down the dowel by all our activity. Like I said, we fixed that later.

The next step was to attach the arm rods, coathanger wire that we cut to the right length, that would control the arms. We looped the end of the wire, tied the arms to it (reinforced by a bit of hot glue) and then cut the excess string off.

We then covered the loop of wire and the string knot, with a hand made out of MM. These hands were other parts that we had to be careful not to move too much until cured as the string and wire protruding from them would slowly widen the holes they were in and cause the hand to become loose.

We styled the hair a bit (as much as any teenage guy styles their hair nowadays) by spraying it lightly with hair spray and kinda' pushing it where we wanted it. A bit of trimming was required too, but not much. My daughter gave Dan some painted eyebrows and he was essentially done.

It was a lot more work than a paper bag puppet or something that she could have done totally without input from me, but she really likes it and hopefully learned a few things. Hopefully he'll hold up for a little while so she can play with him too.

It's a world of laughter, a world of crafts...

For those of you reading this blog besides my family (yeah, you two know who you are), I should tell you that my daughter used to have a Small World room. It's being slowly changed to a Princess Room now, but once upon a time it was small world. My wife and I had gathered quite a few Small World things, and with just a little bit of paint and craft stuff from Michael's we were able to kinda theme her whole room. It was an apartment so most of my really elaborate ideas were not possible (no painting the walls except for one colored accent wall). One idea I did have though was to recreate the big smiling clock face from the attraction. Here he is below... It really wasn't as hard as you would think. Somewhere online I found the clockface all drawn out in a front view. I think it was taken from blueprints because the proportions looked dead on. I used this to plan everything out. Down at Home Depot I bought a prefinished white laminate disc. I didn't plan for it to be finished like this- I just figured I'd by a round piece of wood, but this worked out great. At Michael's (local craft store) I found some little paper mache round boxes for the eyes and cheeks (see the second picture below) as well as lots of doweling and wooden spheres, and of course the secret to any Small World decor- lots and lots of glitter.

Above can see here the circle piece and the two simple pieces I cut out of playwood to form the face (and a bit of my sock at the bottom there!)
Here's the main shapes just sitting in place to get the idea. I really didn't document this process as thouroughly as I could have, but you can see below, I've painted the nose, and the gold portions around the eye.

Here not only have I screwed the top layer down (and attached that nose too, though I don't remember how- probably through the back), but I've also used some thin gold braid (from the fabric section of Michael's) to border the eye gold and the triangle. The braid stands in for the raised metal that is used on the real clockface, and I don't believe it actually is on the bottom of the triangle, but I thought it helped defind the space better and mask off the gold eye paint.

Ok, here's where I skipped a lot of steps. I used bigger gold braid for the mouth (again, standing in for metal) and placed the now painted gold circle boxes over the ends, then hot glued them in place. On top of these I used the doweling and wooden sphere's to make the little sunburst shapes that go over the cheeks, glued those down, and glued a wooden button covered in silver glitter on that. The eyes were constructed similarly: The box was glued on open side up and I made a different starburst of 1 sphere surrounded by doweling (mine only has 6 spines, the real one has many more. Looks like they used a small wheel of some sort). The scrollwork on the triangle is all thin braid glued into place. The shape under the chin is a wooden button with glitter again and the shape on the traingle is a piece of glittered foam. All in all I was very happy with this. The room overall was not all it could be but little things we did like this made it neat. I even put a picture hangar on the back at an angle so that the clock is perpetually tilted mid-tick. Now if someone can just tell me a good way to get it to rotate back and forth. Now that the Princess room is going in, I've salvaged it for myself.

Yeah, we wrote these lousy lyrics...

Wendell is one example of a final Animatronic figure (below) that I don't think matched the Marc Davis art very closely. The face matches, but to me, the Marc Davis art shows a stockier Wendell, while the Animatronic seem's slenderer especially around the neck, which to me changes the whole look of the face. I tried to match the art exactly, except that I gave my sculpture the mandolin of the final figure as opposed to the banjo that Davis drew him with.

I wasn't entirely happy with his face; like Henry there were some big symmetry problems. I was happy with how well I was able to match the posture of Davis' art- that arched back as Wendell hits some horrible off key note. This was the last Country Bear I sculpted. Like I mentioned on a previous post, each bear got a bit bigger each time. Wendell wasn't bigger than Trixie, but he was bigger in scale than he should have been. I figured it was time to take a break before I did another, perhaps find one from this set that I was happy with and then redo the others and new ones to match that scale. But as it happens, life gets in the way. I'd love to get back to this project some day though. And of course then there's America Sings...

Tears will be the chaser for her wine

This was the first one where I really relied on the Marc Davis artwork. Even though Trixie is basically a big lump, the way her arms are postitioned and the subtle tilt of her head are perfect here, and something that would go unnoticed on the actual Animatronics figure. The main thing I changed was the position of her feet, cause I liked the way the Animatronic kind of rocked back and forth on her box and kicked her feet a bit. Like I said, this is my favorite of the 4 that I did. Don't know why, there's just something about it I really like.

The End

Until tomorrow's entry that is.

Howdy Folks!

The second Country Bear I tried to sculpt was Henry, the host of the show. Like Big Al, I relied a bit more on photos than the Marc Davis art for this one. Specifically, I noticed that Henry has a particular posture I wanted to capture, kind of leaning forward on his seat. The animatronic figure also has a very well defined shape, as opposed to some of the others which tend to kind of be furry lumps. I got the body shape pretty well, though the face has some symmetry problems, little stuff that wasn't really noticeable until I had finally painted it. The most frustrating thing though is that his scale is out of proportion with Big Al's. In fact each subsequent Bear I did was bigger than the last. I think this was an unfortunate effect of putting more and more care into each figure- the more detail I added, the more clay it took to achieve and in my enthusiasm I wasn't paying attention to the sizes. I meant to remedy this and actually made a second Henry, but he met with an unfortunate accident before he could be painted. Oh well. Below are the pictures of the first Henry.

Ya'll come back tomorrow for that special treat out of Tampa. A little bit of ever loving cuddlesome fluff, our own Trixie! She's the one I'm most proud of. See ya'll real soon!

There... was... BLOOD on the saddle....

About 8 years ago I decided that I wanted to try sculpting the characters from the Country Bear Jamboree. How hard could that be? Mind you I had no real sculpting experience, just a class or two in high school, and when I say class, I mean there was an hour where they let me play with some clay and simple tools- instruction was really not part of the process. Anyway, I had always loved seeing pictures of small maquettes and the beautifully sculpted larger than life characters in this Disneyland attraction seemed like the perfect subject to try my hand at.

The first one I decided to tackle was Big Al. For reference I used the above piece of Marc Davis art and lots of photos of the final Audio-Animatronics figure. All I used was some simple white clay that I bought at a craft store, toothpicks to sculpt some of the smaller details and acrylic craft paint.

I was so happy with this sculpture- like all art, it's just so satisfying to take something that's just an idea in your head and see it through, in this case to a fully dimensional object. In retrospect, it's far from perfect. I sculpted the way I painted back then- I was more about the overall impression than the fine details, so things are lumpy and rough and not as refined as they could be. But the overall sculpture had the pose and personality that I liked- and keep in mind he's just under 3 inches tall. What's even better is that as I did each subsequent bear they got bigger and bigger, so Big Al ironically ended up being the smallest. Stay tuned and I'll post the 3 other Country Bears that I sculpted. See you real soon!